LONDON, May 21 (Reuters) – Creditors in a Kazakh bank are
poised to see the first proceeds from a four-year court battle
against its former chairman, a fugitive oligarch accused of
embezzling $6.0 billion.

Lender BTA said on Tuesday the English High Court
had given it permission to sell three of Mukhtar Ablyazov’s
luxury UK properties, including a nine-bedroomed mansion in
north London’s “billionaire’s row” and a 100-hectare (40-acre)
country estate.

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s top fraud prosecutor is likely to face serious criticism over its handling of an investigation into the $600 million collapse of one of London’s oldest hedge funds, a judge said on Tuesday.

Already smarting from a 300 million pound ($466 million) damages claim after a botched investigation into the Tchenguiz property moguls, the office is under pressure from politicians who say it has not done enough to bring bankers and other financial industry figures to book since the 2008 crisis.

LONDON, April 26 (Reuters) – Commerzbank, Germany’s
second-largest lender, on Friday lost a high-profile appeal
against a UK court ruling that forces it to pay 104 London-based
bankers around 52 million euros ($68 million) in bonuses, plus
costs.

Commerzbank had argued that its now-integrated Dresdner
Kleinwort subsidiary was justified in slashing 2008 bonuses as
losses spiralled to 6.5 billion euros and threatened the
survival of the business.

LONDON, March 28 (Reuters) – A group of shareholders in
Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has launched a
multi-million pound lawsuit against the state-owned bank for
misleading investors at the height of the credit crisis in 2008.

In the first court document filed in the UK over the bank’s
record 12 billion pound ($18 billion) cash call in April 2008, a
group of 21 claimants – including international investors and
pension funds – allege the bank published a defective prospectus
littered with misstatements and omissions.

LONDON (Reuters) – Prudential Plc has been fined 30 million pounds and had its CEO publicly censured for failing to inform Britain’s financial watchdog about an ill-fated Asian takeover.

The fine, one of the heaviest dished out by the Financial Services Authority (FSA), rekindles bitter memories of a costly misjudgement which Britain’s biggest insurer and its Chief Executive Tidjane Thiam are keen to consign to the past.

LONDON, March 27 (Reuters) – Prudential Plc has been
fined 30 million pounds ($45.5 million) and had its CEO publicly
censured for failing to inform Britain’s financial watchdog
about an ill-fated Asian takeover.

The fine, one of the heaviest dished out by the Financial
Services Authority (FSA), rekindles bitter memories of a costly
misjudgement which Britain’s biggest insurer and its Chief
Executive Tidjane Thiam are keen to consign to the past.

LONDON, March 19 (Reuters) – An English judge said oligarch
Mukhtar Ablyazov, who has been in hiding since he was sentenced
to jail for contempt of court last year, organised a complex
fraud to embezzle billions of dollars from Kazakh bank BTA
.

Judge Nigel Teare said on Tuesday that Ablyazov must have
orchestrated or authorised false loans and “deceived” BTA’s
board by failing to disclose his interest in borrowers.

LONDON, March 14 (Reuters) – Any attempt by bankers to
overturn in court the European Union’s plans to cap their
bonuses is unlikely to succeed, and could at best result in
delays and relatively minor tweaks.

Lawyers say they do not expect banking clients to put their
heads above the parapet and challenge the European Union in
Luxembourg’s European Court of Justice (ECJ), partly because a
previous attempt ultimately foundered.

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s fraud-busting agency said it might have a conflict of interest in its investigation of Autonomy, a British software company accused of accounting irregularities by its new U.S. owners Hewlett-Packard Co (HPQ.N: Quote, Profile, Research).

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) said on Tuesday it might be using an Autonomy product, Introspect, as a document management tool as it formally confirmed that it had opened a criminal investigation into how the British company was sold.

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s fraud-busting agency said it might have a conflict of interest in its investigation of Autonomy, a British software company accused of accounting irregularities by its new U.S. owners Hewlett-Packard Co.

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) said on Tuesday it might be using an Autonomy product, Introspect, as a document management tool as it formally confirmed that it had opened a criminal investigation into how the British company was sold.