Tyco International Limited

The rash of corporate scandals this year could mark a turning point in the way white-collar crime is viewed by the public and prosecuted by the government, legal experts say. The popular refrain now is that simply fining executives for wrongdoing under...

For stock fund investors, one of the lasting effects from this bear market may be a new respect for "middle-ground" portfolio management. Conservative fund companies including American Funds, Dodge & Cox and the index-oriented Vanguard Group typically...

With an accounting overhaul on the way, shareholder activists are beginning to renew the bitter battle over CEO compensation. But they still face daunting obstacles. Audit and accounting issues were the focus of most reform efforts that followed Enron...

Embattled former Tyco International Ltd. Chief Executive Dennis Kozlowski was charged with fraud today, accused of systematically looting the conglomerate of tens of millions of dollars. Manhattan District Atty. Robert Morgenthau announced the...

In 1997, a young law student named Gregory Todd Lawrence concluded in a 35,000-word analysis that faulty legwork by a state court had plunged a Maryland insurance case into the "dreaded Serbonian bog." The poetic flourish, immortalized in Milton's...

Last year, Timothy Callahan got it coming and going. In April, he resigned as chief executive of Chicago-based Equity Office Properties Trust, receiving "separation pay" of $1.65 million, roughly equal to a year's salary and bonus, plus accelerated...

I consider myself a fairly fearless traveler. I've eaten things indigenous that were inedible (goat stomach, anyone?), hitched rides from people whose language I didn't speak, and bartered the shirt off my back for a souvenir. Until recently, though, I'd...

The leadership transition at McDonald's Corp. was about as seamless as it gets. But new Chief Executive Charlie Bell still faces significant challenges, even though he inherited a company in the midst of a turnaround. Bell, 43, has never held a top...

It was an incredible year of news in American business--for all the wrong reasons. Scandals and shenanigans dominated the headlines. The venerable Andersen accounting firm, a Chicago business institution for 89 years, disintegrated after it was...

Executives and board members at some of Maryland's most profitable companies have lucrative side arrangements with the companies they run and oversee. Edwin F. Hale Sr., the chairman, chief executive and largest stockholder at First Mariner Bancorp,...

Monday's events at McDonald's Corp. are a wake-up call for companies without second-in-command executives. Most corporate boards have contingency plans for the sudden death or disability of a chief executive, such as tapping a senior board member as...

Amid growing unrest over corporate scandals and huge compensation packages, executives and board members at more than a third of the biggest public firms that have gone belly up this year sold company stock in the months before their bankruptcy filing....