INSIDER TRADING

Ahead of his sentencing later this month, former director of Goldman Sachs Rajat Gupta has got support from prominent personalities like former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates who advocated a lenient sentence for insider trading, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

Japan’s top financial regulator, Tadahiro Matsushita, was found dead at his home in Tokyo on Monday, with police suspecting a suicide.

Zynga Inc. lost another high-profile executive, when Alan Patmore, the San Francisco-based social game developer's general manager for its popular Facebook title "CityVille," left the company for Kixeye Inc.

Zynga is planning a dramatic internal restructuring following last week's poor financial performance that includes stripping the current COO of his product oversight responsibilities, according to sources within the company. But will this actually help the company recoup some of its losses?

Does the industry deserve the reputation earned by a few rotten apples?

In a survey of 500 financial service workers in the UK and U.S., a quarter said they would need to engage in illegal conduct to be successful, while 16 percent said they would commit a crime - insider trading - if they could get away with it.

Top Japanese securities firm Nomura Holdings, which has been caught in an insider trading scandal, will slash the compensation of its CEO, Kenichi Watanabe, and other top executives by as much as 50 percent for six months and lay off those involved in insider trading, the company said Friday.

Rajat Gupta, former Goldman Sachs Group director and head of consulting firm McKinsey & Co., was convicted Friday of insider trading by a New York federal jury in one of corporate America's most high-profile scandals.

Former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta, who is accused of insider trading, will not testify in his own defense, according to a letter written by his main lawyer to the U.S. District Judge in New York.

Former Goldman Sachs Group Inc board member Rajat Gupta, who is on trial over insider trading charges, has decided not to take the risk of testifying in his own defence.

Ex-dictator Hosni Mubarak is slipping in and out of consciousness eight days after he was sent to prison to begin serving a life sentence, an Egyptian security official said Sunday.

The Industrial and Commerce Bank of China (Hong Kong: 1398; Shanghai: 601398), the world's largest bank, is set to buy an 80 percent stake in Bank of East Asia (BEA) USA, based in New York.

In its latest employment contract with CEO Aubrey McClendon, Chesapeake Energy Corp gave him permission to trade commodities for himself after he already had begun doing so.

Eduardo Saverin is just one of four co-founders of the social-network powerhouse that is Facebook. But what makes Saverin so unique, among other qualities, is that while he is the only co-founder to have no decision making power in the company, he still owns less than 5 percent of Facebook's shares and has a net worth of $2 billion.

Shares of Chesapeake Energy Corp., the No. 2 natural gas producer in the U.S., plunged Wednesday after a report that the CEO and co-founder secretly ran a hedge fund that traded in the same commodities that the Oklahoma City company produces.

Brazilian investment bank BTG Pactual raised 3.65 billion reais ($1.96 billion) in the country's largest initial public offering in more than 2 1/2 years amid strong demand, a local regulator said Tuesday.

Federal prosecutors in California are investigating a Goldman Sachs employee for insider trading, according to prosecutors and defense lawyers who attended a hearing in U.S. federal court in New York on Thursday.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a petition from imprisoned former Enron executive Jefffrey Skilling.

President Barack Obama called on Wednesday for stricter controls on lawmakers to confront the corrosive influence of money in Washington as he signed into law an insider trading ban he said was needed to help restore trust in the U.S. government.

Trading on nonpublic information is already illegal for House and Senate members, but the new law bars them and any other federal employee from trading on nonpublic information about upcoming legislation or regulations. It also tightens disclosure requirements on financial transactions.

Rihanna has agreed to be a judge for the second season of American X Factor, according to claims made by MTO based on an anonymous source they say is an insider.