James Conwell was an employee of Kole Construction, a carpentry sub-contractor to James McHugh Construction Company, working at a job site at 1111 S. State Street in Chicago, when the ladder collapsed.  He fell, and the beam struck him on the back of his head and neck.  The serious injuries he suffered at the scene have now been declared by his doctor and the federal government as total and permanent.

After a two-week trial, the jury returned the verdict after closing arguments were presented by attorneys Antonio M. Romanucci, of Romanucci & Blandin, LLC, and Daniel E. O'Brien, of Burke & O'Brien, P.C., who represented the plaintiffs, and Angelo Spyratos and Pamela Pierro, of Momkus McCluskey, LLC, representing the defendant, James McHugh Construction Company.

The Complaint alleged that McHugh was aware that subcontractors on the project were using inadequate ladders for the required work but failed to have them removed from the job site until after the injury.  It also alleged that McHugh had a formal safety program and procedures that it failed to follow, that it failed to enforce its safety rules that required subcontractor employees to wear stickers on their hard hats to verify attendance at mandatory McHugh safety orientation.

The jury agreed with the plaintiffs' contentions that McHugh failed to comply with ANSI and OSHA regulations, to provide safe and suitable equipment, and to make reasonable inspections of the premise to ensure compliance with their own safety program.  After undergoing surgery on the day of his accident to repair a deep neck and facial laceration, Conwell began follow-up treatment.  Visits to numerous specialists confirmed that there was no cure for his persistent aura migraines, neck pain, tinnitus and severe hyperacusis in the right ear as a result of the accident.  Because of the severity of his symptoms, his life has become one of isolation in his home, which has required his wife Roberta to take on the duties of both parents to their school-age son.

The case, James Conwell and Roberta Conwell vs. James McHugh Construction Company, No. 06L4924.  The judge in the case was Hon. Thomas Flanagan.

SOURCE Romanucci & Blandin, LLC

Gormbley, a "Top-Talent" employee of  GE, filed the Complaint after the Company cut his compensation, reduced his responsibilities and destroyed his professional reputation after he repeatedly expressed legitimate concerns to his superiors that GE Capital's valuation methods resulted in a grossly inflated valuation of Momentive in 2008.

Gormbley is represented in the matter  by Sanford Wittels & Heisler LLP, in Washington, D.C.   

"Mr. Gormbley repeatedly was warned to keep what he knew about GE Capital's valuation of Momentive to himself," said David Sanford. "When Gormbley refused  to play GE's games, GE swiftly and brutally  retaliated against  him."

In addition to GE Capital Services, the suit names General Electric Company, GE Equity, GE Company Chair and CEO Jeffrey Immelt, and a number of other high-ranking corporate executives as defendants.

Gormbley was hired by GE in 2000, joining its Financial Management Program.  After working in a wide range of divisions throughout the company, he joined GE Commercial Finance, a subdivision of GE Capital in 2006. Throughout  his rise through the ranks, he earned and maintained a spot on the top rung of the company's forced ranking system. His strong, positive performance also won  him a coveted position on GE's corporate audit staff. 

In mid-2008, Gormbley became concerned  because he recognized that GE's valuation of Momentive was inflated by some $2  billion. He shared these conclusions with his superiors.  They were not appreciative. 

GE's first response to Gormbley's bad  news was to ignore the message.  When Gormbley persisted in making his concerns known to an increasing circle of individuals in the company, GE's answer was to kill the messenger.

In early October 2008, while the  financial sector was in a state of turmoil, GE announced a $12 billion stock offering, touting the company's financial soundness and pledging to maintain its high quarterly dividend.  Yet, at the same time, it was becoming increasingly clear that GE Capital was in trouble.  In fact, in private meetings with Bush administration Treasury Department officials, including then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Immelt expressed concerns about GE and GE Capital's finances and financial stability.

In November and December 2008, Gormbley continued to warn GE about Momentive's declining performance and recommended that GE Equity take a write down of Momentive's valuation.  Gormbley was explicitly and implicitly  warned to stop talking about Momentive's decline and its effects on GE.  Gormbley's superiors instructed him to change his valuation methodologies for Momentive calculations and to stop "making things so difficult."

In January of 2009 Gormbley's concerns about GE's over-valuation of Momentive were confirmed.  At that time, GE Equity received  Momentive's board book verifying that the value of Momentive had plummeted.  With this written corroboration of his  concerns, Mr. Gormbley sent an email to the President of GE Capital and other senior GE officials in which he again advocated a write-down of Momentive.  In response, GE chastised Mr. Gormbley  for making the situation public and discouraged him from speaking at  meetings. 

But Gormbley would not stay silent. He  had witnessed and objected to GE Capital's overstatement of Momentive's value and its concealment and misrepresentation of faulty valuation data to internal  controllers, external auditors, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. In its February 2009 Form 10-K filing, GE chose not to include the most updated  valuation information for Momentive, thereby violating the SEC's reporting  requirements.

In response, GE Equity's leadership  initiated a campaign of retaliation that ended Gormbley's career at the company and caused him severe financial and emotional harm.  The retaliation included removing him from a team of energy investment professionals, prohibiting him from pursuing  new deals, passing him over as a board observer on an investment deal in which  he has served as lead underwriter, reducing his performance rating, cutting his  year-end bonus, removing him from the Momentive account, excluding him from  meetings essential to his performance, delaying his 2009 performance review, refusing him the opportunity to work from home or utilize flex time, and  threatening to revoke a $133,000 loan.

"GE did everything it could possibly do  to discredit me, ruin my reputation within the company and generally make my  life miserable," said Gormbley. "When I asked Human Resources to investigate the  retaliation I was being regularly subjected to, my requests were ignored.  To preserve my professional reputation and financial security, I finally had to resign."

The Complaint calculates damages at over $10 million.  

Sanford Wittels & Heisler is a law firm with offices in Washington, D.C., New York, and San Francisco that specializes in employment discrimination, wage and  hour, consumer and complex corporate class action litigation and has represented  thousands of individuals in some of the major class action cases in the  United  States. The firm also represents individual clients in employment, employment discrimination, sexual harassment, whistleblower, public accommodations, commercial, medical malpractice, and  personal injury matters

The lawsuit focuses on two funds sold by Plano's Parkcentral Global and was filed on behalf of Houston financial consultant Gus H. Comiskey and four Tucson, Ariz.-based entities, including the Thomas R. Brown Family Private Foundation. The now-defunct Parkcentral Global was operated by affiliates of billionaire and former presidential candidate H. Ross Perot before closing its doors after losing a total of more than $2.6 billion.

"Our clients were told that an investment in Parkcentral was designed to preserve capital.  Instead, they lost every penny in record time.  E&Y was supposed to be auditing Parkcentral, but the audited financial statements never once warned Parkcentral's investors of their impending doom," says attorney Demetrios Anaipakos, who will try the case with Amir H. Alavi.

The lawsuit includes claims that New York-based Ernst & Young falsely represented that the company fairly audited Parkcentral Global and the auditor failed in its "watchdog" role to warn relying investors of the risk of fraud and noncompliance by management.  The suit accuses Ernst & Young of fraud, negligent misrepresentation, securities fraud and conspiracy.

This month, Brown Investment Management, L.P., one of the plaintiffs in this suit against Ernst & Young, won a Delaware Supreme Court ruling that requires Parkcentral Global to disclose its former investors. Those investors could be added to the new Houston lawsuit.

The investments of the Brown foundation, Brown Investment Management and the two other family-related ventures totaled $16 million and were lost within 90 days despite a "worst case loss" estimate of 5 percent. Mr. Comiskey, like his fellow investors, lost 100 percent of his investment when Parkcentral Global went under.

Mr. Anaipakos and Mr. Alavi have handled disputes against hedge funds and private equity firms for more than a decade. This lawsuit is separate from a class action filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas against Parkcentral Global.

The Harris County District Court lawsuit, Brown Investment Management, L.P. v. Ernst & Young, LLP, No. 2010- 53393, was filed Aug. 25, 2010.

Ahmad, Zavitsanos & Anaipakos represents plaintiffs and defendants in securities fraud, breach of fiduciary duty and other commercial litigation matters. More information about the firm can found at http://www.azalaw.com/index.html.

"The summary affirmation of the approval cuts about two years off the appeal process and was based on the hard work of the legal team Lead Counsel Robert Bonsignore assembled and directed," said R. Deryl Edwards, class counsel for several states including Arkansas.  "The summary affirmation of the settlement recognizes the real value of the settlement and the fact that it was reached only after years of hard fought litigation during which Plaintiffs counsels not only worked tirelessly without pay but advanced millions of dollars without any certainty of being paid," Attorney Bonsignore said. Bonsignore went on to add that, "The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court's ruling puts an end to an attempt by 4 of 3.4 million employees, who are represented by lawyers who make a living objecting to class action settlements to block the rest of the class from receiving benefit of the settlement," Attorney Robert Bonsignore went on to say. It is important to add that Wal-Mart stood by their employees.

The settlement class is the largest wage and hour case in United States history. Robert Bonsignore, the employees' national Lead Counsel said during oral argument, "Today is a good day for all concerned. The focus however is singular this case is all about the employees. In addition to the economic value, a real ongoing value is afforded the employees through the injunctive relief component of the settlement." In addition to making $85 Million dollars available, Wal-Mart also agreed to injunctive relief designed to institutionalize measures that eliminate, minimize and/or red flag for corrective action occurrences that were the subject of the employee's action.

Further information contact Robert Bonsignore on his cell phone at 781 856 7650, office 781 350 0000.

SOURCE Bonsignore and Brewer

According to the superseding information to which Nemazee pleaded guilty, documents filed in court, and statements made during the guilty plea and sentencing proceedings, from 1998 to 2009, Nemazee obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from BofA, Citibank, and HSBC. To obtain the loans, Nemazee misrepresented to the banks that he owned hundreds of millions of dollars in collateral, in the form of securities and other assets, which he did not own. In fact, Nemazee used fake documents, including bogus account statements, to show his supposed ownership of the collateral. The documents also contained forged signatures of persons associated with Westminster Securities Corporation, the brokerage firm at which Nemazee claimed to hold these assets, as well as Westminster's clearing firm, Pershing LLC.

The fake account statements and other documents that Nemazee provided also contained telephone numbers, supposedly for Westminster and Pershing, which were in fact assigned to "virtual offices" that Nemazee himself had established or to a cell phone that Nemazee himself had obtained. Nemazee created at least two "virtual offices" in Manhattan that held themselves out, at his direction, as being associated with Westminster and Pershing.

One of the loans from BofA, a $100 million line of credit, was guaranteed by Nemazee's longtime friend and business associate, who pledged a multi-million dollar home in Colorado as collateral on the loan, not knowing that the collateral that Nemazee was pledging did not exist. As of August 2009, Nemazee owed approximately $142 million to BofA and $74.9 million to Citibank.

In August 2009 - when Citibank began to ask questions in order to verify the existence of the purported collateral that Nemazee had pledged for the Citibank loan, and after special agents of the FBI had interviewed Nemazee about the Citibank loan - Nemazee drew down on a line of credit that he had fraudulently obtained from HSBC earlier in 2009 and used those funds to pay Citibank the $74.9 million that he owed.

Nemazee was able to continue the fraud for longer than a decade by, among other things, making partial repayments on his borrowings from BofA with proceeds of his fraud on Citibank and making partial repayments on his borrowings from Citibank with proceeds of his fraud on BofA.

Nemazee used the proceeds of his fraudulent schemes to, among other things: purchase an apartment and land in Italy; make monthly maintenance payments on a Park Avenue apartment; pay for the upkeep of a 12-acre property in Katonah, N.Y.; purchase partial interests in a private plane and a luxury yacht; make personal donations to the election campaigns of federal, state and local candidates, political action committees, and charities; and make various other investments.

Nemazee also used his political donations to enhance his reputation and standing in political circles. In 2009, Nemazee unsuccessfully attempted to capitalize on that standing by seeking nomination to a Cabinet-level position, all the while engaged in the fraud for which he was sentenced. Nemazee had previously been nominated as U.S. Ambassador to Argentina in 1999, but his nomination was withdrawn.

Nemazee, 60, of Manhattan, was ordered to surrender on Aug. 27, 2010.

Nemazee's brother-in-law, Shahin Kashanchi, 47, of Telluride, Colo., is separately charged in an indictment with aiding and abetting Nemazee's bank fraud by manufacturing the fake account statements and other documents that Nemazee used to defraud BofA, Citibank and HSBC. Kashanchi's case is pending in Manhattan federal court. The charge and allegations contained in the indictment charging Kashanchi are merely accusations, and Kashanchi is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

U.S. Attorney Bharara praised the investigative work of the FBI. U.S. Attorney Bharara also thanked BofA, Citibank, HSBC, and Pershing for their assistance in the investigation.

"For over a decade, Hassan Nemazee authored a fantastic fiction, stealing $292 million by acting the part of wealthy and influential power broker," said U.S. Attorney Bharara. "In the end, justice is blind to political affiliations and powerful connections, and today, like any other defendant, Nemazee faces the stark consequences of his decision to violate the law."

"Nemazee lived like a prince, with palatial properties on two continents," said FBI New York office Acting Assistant Director-in-Charge Venizelos. "But he financed this lavish lifestyle with hundreds of millions in fraudulently obtained loans, so his empire was really a house of cards. The FBI remains determined to stop those who steal from banks through deceit and trickery."

This case was brought in coordination with President Barack Obama's Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, on which U.S. Attorney Bharara serves as a Co-Chair of the Securities and Commodities Fraud Working Group. President Obama established the interagency Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force to wage an aggressive, coordinated, and proactive effort to investigate and prosecute financial crimes. The task force includes representatives from a broad range of federal agencies, regulatory authorities, inspectors general, and state and local law enforcement who, working together, bring to bear a powerful array of criminal and civil enforcement resources. The task force is working to improve efforts across the federal executive branch, and with state and local partners, to investigate and prosecute significant financial crimes, ensure just and effective punishment for those who perpetrate financial crimes, combat discrimination in the lending and financial markets, and recover proceeds for victims of financial crimes.

The case is being handled by the U.S. Attorney's Office's Complex Frauds and Asset Forfeiture Units.

The Court found that the defendants operated warehouses containing large quantities of counterfeit golf equipment that was sold in golf stores, including the Beijing World Famous Golf Store and the Beijing Te Qi Qiao International Commerce Center.  After receiving complaints from the Anti-Counterfeiting Group, Chinese PSB officers raided these targets and seized more than 2,300 counterfeit golf clubs and a large number of counterfeit golf caps, bags and accessories.  The seized goods were illegal copies of authentic products made by all of the Group's members.

According to the Group, "the jail sentences demonstrate that counterfeiting is a serious crime.  Counterfeiters steal the trademarks and intellectual property rights of brand owners and defraud consumers who think that they are buying genuine products."

The Anti-Counterfeiting Group consists of the world's leading golf equipment manufacturers. Its members and brands include Acushnet Company - Titleist and FootJoy; Callaway Golf - Odyssey, Top-Flite and Ben Hogan; Cleveland Golf /Srixon and Never Compromise; Nike Golf; PING; and TaylorMade-adidas Golf and Ashworth.  The Anti-Counterfeiting Group was formed in 2004 to petition governments to enforce their country's laws against counterfeiters of golf equipment products.  As a result of the Anti-Counterfeiting Group's petitioning efforts, dozens of successful raids of manufacturing, warehouse, assembly and retail facilities have been executed by Chinese law enforcement and civil enforcement authorities over the past five years.  Many business operators have been arrested and have now been prosecuted and sentenced in the Chinese courts.

The American Civil Liberties Union today filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit on behalf of 10 U.S. citizens and lawful residents who are prohibited from flying to or from the United States or over U.S. airspace because they are on the government's "No Fly List." None of the individuals in the lawsuit, including a disabled U.S. Marine Corps veteran stranded in Egypt and a U.S. Army veteran stuck in Colombia, have been told why they are on the list or given a chance to clear their names.

"More and more Americans who have done nothing wrong find themselves unable to fly, and in some cases unable to return to the U.S., without any explanation whatsoever from the government," said Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. "A secret list that deprives people of the right to fly and places them into effective exile without any opportunity to object is both un-American and unconstitutional."

The ACLU, along with its affiliates in Oregon, Southern California, Northern California and New Mexico, filed the lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI and the Terrorist Screening Center in U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. The plaintiffs on the case are:

• Ayman Latif, a U.S. citizen and disabled Marine veteran living in Egypt who has been barred from flying to the United States and, as a result, cannot take a required Veterans' Administration disability evaluation;
• Raymond Earl Knaeble, a U.S. citizen and U.S. Army veteran who is stuck in Santa Marta, Colombia after being denied boarding on a flight to the United States;
• Steven Washburn, a U.S. citizen and U.S. Air Force veteran who was prevented from flying from Europe to the United States or Mexico; he eventually flew to Brazil, from there to Peru, and from there to Mexico, where he was detained and finally escorted across the border by U.S. and Mexican officials;
• Samir Mohamed Ahmed Mohamed, Abdullatif Muthanna, Nagib Ali Ghaleb and Saleh A. Omar, three American citizens and a lawful permanent resident of the United States who were prevented from flying home to the U.S. after visiting family members in Yemen;
• Mohamed Sheikh Abdirahman Kariye, a U.S. citizen and resident of Portland, Oregon who was prevented from flying to visit his daughter who is in high school in Dubai;
• Adama Bah, a citizen of Guinea who was granted political asylum in the United States, where she has lived since she was two, who was barred from flying from New York to Chicago for work; and
• Halime Sat, a German citizen and lawful permanent resident of the United States who lives in California with her U.S.-citizen husband who was barred from flying from Long Beach, California to Oakland to attend a conference and has since had to cancel plane travel to participate in educational programs and her family reunion in Germany.

According to the ACLU's legal complaint, thousands of people have been added to the "No Fly List" and barred from commercial air travel without any opportunity to learn about or refute the basis for their inclusion on the list. The result is a vast and growing list of individuals who, on the basis of error or innuendo, have been deemed too dangerous to fly but who are too harmless to arrest.

"Without a reasonable way for people to challenge their inclusion on the list, there's no way to keep innocent people off it," said Nusrat Choudhury, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. "The government's decision to prevent people from flying without giving them a chance to defend themselves has a huge impact on people's lives - including their ability to perform their jobs, see their families and, in the case of U.S. citizens, to return home to the United States from abroad."

In addition to Wizner and Choudhury, attorneys on the case are Kevin Diaz and cooperating attorney Steven Wilker with the ACLU of Oregon; Ahilan Arulanantham, Jennie Pasquarella and cooperating attorney Reem Salahi with the ACLU of Southern California; Alan Schlosser and Julia Harumi Mass of the ACLU of Northern California; and Laura Ives of the ACLU of New Mexico. The Council on American-Islamic Relations consulted with Raymond Knaeble and directed him to the ACLU.

The ACLU's complaint is available online at: www.aclu.org/national-security/latif-et-al-v-holder-et-al-complaint.  More information about the ACLU's lawsuit is available online at: www.aclu.org/national-security/aclu-challenges-government-no-fly-list-0.