Business
Property insurance system puts Floridians at risk
Sarasota Herald-Tribune reporter Paige St. John spent the past year investigating Florida’s property insurance crisis. Her work exposed companies that continued to sell policies when they had no way to pay claims and revealed company owners who demanded rate hikes while secretly siphoning profits from their struggling businesses. The series also revealed how insurers and…
Read MoreElder placement agencies cash in
Michael Berens, of The Seattle Times, uncovered the hidden cost of elder placement agencies that promise to match seniors to long-term care facilities – for free. Elder placement is a national multi-million dollar industry with no rules and zero oversight. Seniors are steered only to facilities that agree to pay hefty commissions. Most placement companies…
Read MoreGovernment wields influence over GM’s IPO
Clare Baldwin, Soyoung Kim and Kevin Krolicki, of Reuters, report that “a review of key events leading up to GM’s IPO and interviews with people involved inside and outside the company show that the U.S. government has been running key aspects of the landmark stock deal and exerting tight oversight on management decisions seen as…
Read MoreX Prize winner in financial trouble
An investigation by Mike Soraghan, of Greenwire, found that the Li-Ion Motors Corp., winners of the coveted X prize for super-fuel-efficient cars, is struggling financially. “Court documents, interviews and the company’s regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission paint a picture of an erratic enterprise that has vacuumed up $50 million from stock holders…
Read MoreMany Massachusetts firms misreported executive pay
Dozens of publicly traded companies in Massachusetts misreported how much they paid their top executives to shareholders and regulators, the Boston Globe found in a review of company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 34 companies made 55 errors ranging from $20 to more than a half a million dollars. The Globe discovered the…
Read MoreCollateralized debt obligations fueled financial crisis
A report by ProPublica’s Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger “shows for the first time the extent to which banks — primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others — bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged.” These banks dealt in collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. A…
Read MoreSmall Business Administration failed hurricane victims in Gulf
The Associated Press investigated how the Small Business Administration responded to the hurricanes of 2005, and the impact on the Gulf Coast five year later. The yearlong investigation by Mitch Weiss, Michael Kunzelman, Holbrook Mohr and Cain Burdeau found that loan officers rejected loans they should have approved, deleted loan applications for no valid reason,…
Read MoreThai Workers Victims of Human Trafficking In Utah
Lee Davidson reported how Thai workers recruited to work on Utah pig and chicken farms were victims of human trafficking. Read “A Story of Modern Slavery in Utah.”
Read MoreInvestigateWest:Cruise Ships Dump Waste To Dodge Laws
An InvestigateWest report on the billion dollar cruise ship industry in the Washington-Alaska cruise market found that most ships avoid tougher state regulations and dump their waste in Canadian waters between the two states, despite state efforts to adopt stricter standards for sewage and wastewater discharge.
Read MoreMortgage Fraud Spawning New Scams
Mortgage fraud is a crime that cost an estimated $14 billion in 2009, prompting the FBI to assemble its largest ever team to fight it. But the tsunami of foreclosures is making classic scams easier and spawning new ones to boot. Reuters correspondent Nick Carey reports from Chicago.
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