We've examined the top 10 compliance news stories in 2022, from major data breaches and fraud awards to million-dollar fines.
Take a look at our summary of key compliance fines in 2022 too!
Elizabeth Holmes, the former CEO and founder of a medical biotech start-up, Theranos, has been found guilty of four counts of conspiracy and fraud. Her sentencing will be finalised in late 2022, and it is expected to include jail time.
Holmes's company claimed it could revolutionise blood testing by supposedly running hundreds of medical tests using just one drop of blood and one machine. This innovation would have had a massive impact on the healthcare industry by making diagnostics cheaper and more accessible. The concept attracted scores of investors, and at one point, Theranos was valued at £6.6bn and raised over £530m in capital from unsuspecting investors.
In reality, Theranos did not have the technology to run this type of efficient testing. Nearly all the tests Theranos ran were carried out using third-party machines that were not its own technology. Of the tests that were carried out in-house, many produced false results. Regardless, Holmes proceeded with her project and false claims.
Holmes' elaborate plot unravelled when whistleblowers exposed Theranos' false claims.
A multimillionaire Azerbaijani politician and his relatives have to turn over millions in suspicious funds brought into the UK through a complex money-laundering scheme known as the "Azerbaijani laundromat."
After ruling that the funds "arise from criminal conduct" and "money laundering," a judge ordered Javanshir Feyziyev and his family to forfeit £5.63 million held in various bank accounts.
This grand scheme was exposed in 2017 when the Danish newspaper Berlingske and numerous other media partners received leaked secret bank records. The data showed that the Azerbaijani leadership had made over 16,000 secret transactions between 2012 and 2014. These transactions were worth approximately $3m a day.
Andy Lewis, head of civil recovery at the National Crime Agency (NCA), said, "This is a substantial forfeiture of money laundered through the Azerbaijan laundromat, and our success highlights the risk to anyone who uses these schemes. We could recover these millions without proving the exact nature of the original criminal activity. We will continue to use civil powers to target money entering the UK via illegitimate means."
Block, formerly known as Square Inc., an American financial services and digital payments company, has reported a cybersecurity and data breach concerning information on more than eight million customers. The breach occurred when a former employee downloaded corporate reports after leaving the company.
The firm stated that: "Upon discovery, we took steps to remediate this issue and launched an investigation with the help of a leading forensics firm […]. We know how these reports were accessed, and we have notified law enforcement."
The exposed data contained information on users who used Cash App's investing products. The data included customers' names and Cash App brokerage account numbers. Some of the data also included portfolio value, holdings, and trading activity details on some customers. The breach did not include usernames, passwords, social security numbers or data that could identify a person.
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has found Clearview AI Inc, a facial recognition database company, over £7.5m. The company provides a service that allows customers, including law enforcement members, to upload an image of a person on the company's app, which is then cross-checked with Clearview AI Inc's database for potential image matches.
The customer is then provided with links to where the images were taken from, such as social media. This way, customers could trace a person's full name and particulars through the publically available information on social media sites from an image.
Authorities found the company breached the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for collecting over 20 billion public images of people's faces. Even though the company collected image data from publicly available sources such as social media, the subjects were not informed that their images were being harvested and used by Clearview AI Inc.
The UK Information Commissioner noted that:
"The company not only enables identification of […] people, but effectively monitors their behaviour and offers it as a commercial service. That is unacceptable. That is why we have acted to protect people in the UK by both fining the company and issuing an enforcement notice."
Following the SFO's successful investigation and prosecution, Andrew Nathaniel Skeene and Junie Conrad Omari Bowers have been sentenced at Southwark Crown Court to 11 years' imprisonment.
Bowers and Skeene were the masterminds behind Global Forestry Investments, a fraudulent green investment scheme that defrauded around 2,000 victims from their savings and pensions.
The con artists persuaded victims to put money into three Brazilian teak tree plantations. They told them they were safe, ethical investments that would support local communities and maintain the Amazon rainforest. In actuality, not much was happening, and the couple used their money to enrich themselves
Skeene and Bowers collectively withdrew about £750k in cash during the schemes' operation and spent an additional £2m on shopping, luxuries, and entertainment. Additionally, Skeene paid for his opulent wedding with money from investors, while Bowers purchased a Bentley Continental GT.
"The investors believed that they were buying into an ethical investment scheme which would yield a safe and steady income. But the reality was that you wrote or said things about the schemes which were either false or misleading at the outset or became so, and you failed to correct them." The Judge highlighted the "serious detrimental impact" the scam had on investors, including some victims being prevented from retiring and suffering "prolonged distress and mental anguish".
- His Honour Judge Pegden QC
Morgan Stanley is to pay $200m over "the use of unapproved personal devices" and substandard record-keeping requirements.
This fine comes only months after regulators in the US imposed a similar penalty on rival bank JPMorgan. In that case, managing directors and other senior employees tried to escape regulatory scrutiny by using WhatsApp and personal email addresses for business-related conversations.
"As technology changes, it's even more important that registrants ensure that their communications are appropriately recorded and are not conducted outside of official channels in order to avoid market oversight," said SEC Chair Gary Gensler.
Citigroup is also facing a fine for using "unapproved electronic messaging channels".
A Tokyo Olympics board member has been arrested on suspicion of taking bribes, along with three other men connected to the scandal.
According to the prosecutor's office, Haruyuki Takahashi, 78, a former executive at the advertising firm Dentsu, is suspected of accepting bribes from the former CEO of Aoki Holdings Inc. and two other company workers.
The alleged bribes, amounting to 51m yen (£315,800), were deposited into a bank account of Takahashi's firm from October 2017 to March 2022 and are believed to be for sponsorship and products related to the Olympic Games.
Takahashi is credited with landing more than £2.5bn in local sponsorships for the Tokyo Olympics. Dentsu is a major player in many huge Japanese events, including the Olympic Games.
The UN International Labour Organisation (ILO) stated that modern slavery has increased by a fifth in the past few years. It is estimated that there are currently 50 million people who are victims of modern slavery and forced labour.
The ILO said around half the people were forced to work against their will. At the same time, the other half were forced into marriage. Both situations and contexts fall under the ILO's definition of modern slavery, where a person "cannot refuse or cannot leave because of threats, violence, deception, abuse of power or other forms of coercion."
The overall situation has worsened with increasing poverty rates due to crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, armed conflicts, climate change, global instability and decreased supply of essential goods like staple foodstuffs and construction/manufacturing materials.
A Tesla factory worker has filed a lawsuit over alleged sexual discrimination on the factory floor. Jessica Barraza claims that months after she started work at a Californian Tesla factory, she started experiencing near-daily harassment, including vulgar comments and inappropriate sexual advances from colleagues.
She claims the work environment became so toxic that it led to a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder following three years of working at the factory. Barraza filed her complaints to Tesla HR in September and October, but they did nothing to tackle the harassment, and it is unclear whether the complaints were even acknowledged internally.
Tesla includes a mandatory arbitration clause in the contracts that mandate employees to settle disputes outside of court. This type of dispute is, therefore, rare. However, Baraza's attorneys claim that this clause is illegal.
Since Barraza has filed the lawsuit, other employees are coming forward with sexual harassment claims. The case remains ongoing, with the official charges citing sexual harassment and failure to prevent sexual harassment at the workplace.
Court filings reveal that almost $3.1 billion is owed to creditors after the FTX cryptocurrency exchange collapse.
FTX, once valued at $32bn, enabled people to buy bitcoin and was one of the biggest global exchanges. Before its collapse, FTX had secured big-name backing from the likes of Sequoia Capital, Temasek, BlackRock and Tiger Global.
Concerns were raised after an online document leak showed its sister company Alameda Research was unstable and had been loaned $10bn from FTX, sparking a run on withdrawals. Over a million investors – 80,000 of them in the UK – are believed to have lost their money. The true scale of losses is still unknown, largely due to poor record keeping.
Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), its unconventional founder who allegedly played video games in pitch meetings, apologised to FTX employees. Many of them were paid in FTX's FTT token, which has dropped 80% in value.
John Ray III, who oversaw the Enron bankruptcy, has replaced him as chief executive. His assessment was damning, "Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here."
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