Tausi Insider

Walmart WMT-N proposed a $3.1-billion legal settlement on Tuesday over the toll of powerful prescription opioids sold at its pharmacies, becoming the latest major drug industry player to promise major support to state, local and tribal governments still grappling with a crisis in overdose deaths. The retail giant’s announcement follows similar proposals on Nov. 2 from the two largest U.S. pharmacy chains, CVS Health CVS-N and Walgreen Co. WBA-Q, which each said they would pay about $5-billion. Most of the drugmakers that produced the most opioids and the biggest drug distribution companies have already reached settlements. With the largest pharmacies now settling, it represents a shift in the opioid litigation saga. For years, the question was whether companies would be held accountable for an overdose crisis that a flood of prescription drugs helped spark. With the crisis still raging, the focus now is on how the settlement dollars – now totalling more than $50 billion – will be use...

Canada’s telecommunications regulator is warning telecom companies not to charge extra fees to customers who pay their bills by credit card. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) released a decision Thursday that denied an application from Telus Corp. to charge a 1.5-per-cent fee to customers who pay by credit card in some markets. The application focused narrowly on customers in some small markets in Alberta and B.C. where fees are regulated by the CRTC. Telus already notified customers in all other markets that it would charge a 1.5 per cent fee for customers paying by credit card starting on Oct. 17. In its decision, the CRTC blocked the fee being charged in those regulated markets on the basis that it was bad for consumer affordability and it warned Telus and its competitors that it was prepared to fight the fees more broadly. “Should this practice continue, or should it become a practice within the telecommunications industry, the Commission is ...

Pakistan’s Supreme Court endorsed on Friday a settlement for Barrick Gold ABX-T to resume mining at the Reko Diq project, one of the world’s largest underdeveloped sites of copper and gold deposits, it said in an order. The endorsement was a condition of the settlement for Barrick to resume work on the project in the southwestern province of Balochistan, bordering Afghanistan and Iran, in which it will invest $10 billion. Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial, the head of a five-judge panel, read out the operative part of the brief order in court. “The agreements … have not been found by us to be unconstitutional or illegal on the parameters and grounds spelt out,” read the order seen by Reuters. President Arif Alvi had asked the court to review the deal. In an out of court agreement this year, Barrick Gold ended a long-running dispute with Pakistan, and agreed to restart development. Under the deal, the company withdrew its case in an international arbitration court, which had slapped a pe...

An investigation conducted by Scotiabank found that some of its employees had inappropriately processed clients’ requests to switch their mutual fund holdings. Deborah Baic/Tausi Insider Bank of Nova Scotia’s BNS-T securities arm will pay $1-million in fines over allegations that dozens of employees engaged in improper sales practices, revealing the bank terminated more than 30 employees for “egregious misconduct.” The settlement deal with Canada’s mutual fund industry regulator, published on Wednesday, also requires Scotia Securities Inc. to return $10.8-million to clients. In Scotia’s agreement with the Mutual Fund Dealers Association, the investment dealer admits to not having adequate policies and procedures to prevent several incidents between 2017 and 2022 when employees padded their sales targets. Scotiabank’s investigation found that some employees inappropriately processed clients’ requests to switch their mutual fund holdings. Instead of processing the trades as switches, w...

Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc META-Q has agreed to pay $725 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit accusing the social media giant of allowing third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, to access users’ personal information. The proposed settlement, which was disclosed in a court filing late on Thursday, would resolve a long-running lawsuit prompted by revelations in 2018 that Facebook had allowed the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to access data of as many as 87 million users. Lawyers for the plaintiffs called the proposed settlement the largest to ever be achieved in a U.S. data privacy class action and the most that Meta has ever paid to resolve a class-action lawsuit. “This historic settlement will provide meaningful relief to the class in this complex and novel privacy case,” the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs, Derek Loeser and Lesley Weaver, said in a joint statement. Meta did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which is subject to ...

Photo : rafapress ( Shutterstock ) Back in July, T-Mobile agreed to pay out $350 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by a number of the company’s customers over a 2021 data breach . At this point, it’s still possible to claim a piece of the payout, but time is running out. Here’s what to know. Why was a class-action lawsuit filed against T-Mobile? In an August 2021 statement , T-Mobile confirmed that there had been a “highly sophisticated cyberattack” against the company’s systems, which had compromised data files with personal information from roughly 7.8 million current customers, as well as 40 million former or prospective customers. This information included first and last names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and driver’s license/ID information. In May 2022 , a group of T-Mobile customers affected by the data breach filed a class-action lawsuit against the company, in which the plaintiffs allege that the number of current, former, and prospective cust...

A City National Bank office in Los Angeles, Calif., on Jan. 22, 2015. Lucy Nicholson/Reuters The U.S. Justice Department accused Los Angeles-based City National Bank on Thursday of discrimination by refusing to underwrite mortgages in predominately Black and Latino communities, requiring the bank to pay more than US$31-million in the largest redlining settlement in department history. City National, which is owned by Royal Bank of Canada RY-T, is the latest bank in the past several years to be found systematically avoiding lending to racial and ethnic minorities, a practice that the Biden administration has set up its own task force to combat. The Justice Department says that between 2017 and 2020, City National avoided marketing and underwriting mortgages in majority Black and Latino neighbourhoods in Los Angeles County. Other banks operating in those neighbourhoods received six times the number of mortgage applications that City National did, according to federal officials. The Jus...