LITTLE ROCK — QUOTE OF THE DAY “We want the right accountability and ownership to be in the hands
of the suppliers.We are placing our orders in good faith.” Rajan Kamalanathan, Wal-Mart’s vice president of ethical sourcing Article, 1DEx-Stanford exec draws 5-year term
HOUSTON - A prosecution witness in the trial of convicted Texas financier R. Allen Stanford was sentenced Tuesday to five years in prison for helping to bilk investors out of more than $7 billion in one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in U.S. history.
James Davis had faced up to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty in 2009 to three fraud and conspiracy charges as part of an agreement with prosecutors.
“I am ashamed and I’m embarrassed,” Davis said at the sentencing hearing at Houston federal court. “I’ve perverted what was right and I hurt thousands of investors. I betrayed their trust and also associates and neighbors and friends and my family.”
Prosecutors say Stanford persuaded investors to buy certificates of deposit from his Caribbean bank, then used that money to bankroll a string of failed businesses and his own lavish lifestyle, including a fleet of private jets and yachts.
At Stanford’s trial last year, Davis - the former chief financial officer of Stanford’s companies - portrayed his ex-boss as the leader of the fraud who burned through billions of CD deposits. He testified that he and Stanford faked the bank’s profits and fabricated documents to hide the fraud.
Stanford, a one-time billionaire, was convicted in March on 13 of 14 fraud-related counts. He was sentenced to 110 years in prison and is serving his sentence in a Central Florida prison.
Can’t skip soot tests, court tells EPA
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency can’t waive testing requirements designed to determine whether projects at large power plants would increase soot pollution, an appeals court has ruled.
Regulations challenged by the Sierra Club that allow some power plants and other industrial facilities to avoid testing that’s aimed at showing the effect of soot on air quality violate the intent of the Clean Air Act, Circuit Judge David Sentelle wrote for a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington.
The court also struck down the authority of the EPA to issue waivers for soot-level monitoring before construction to establish a base line on pollution for future testing.
“The monitoring requirement is a regulatory function that provides benefits, and the statute precludes the EPA from exempting that requirement,” Sentelle wrote in the decision issued Tuesday.
The lack of a base-line test is “like a doctor telling someone they don’t know how much of a dangerous drug they’re taking before giving them more,” said David Baron, managing attorney for Earthjustice, a San Francisco-based environmental advocacy group, who argued the case on behalf of the Sierra Club.
David Bloomgren, a spokesman for the EPA, didn’t immediately return phone calls requesting comment.
N.Y. paper reduces home delivery
Beginning Feb. 3, The Syracuse Post-Standard in New York will reduce its home newspaper delivery to three days a week and will only have newsstand sales in a single county for its print edition the other four days as it moves to rely more on its online operation, officials of the new Syracuse Media Group announced Sunday.
The newspaper reported that its owner, Advance Publications, has created two media companies, resulting in 115 of its 415 employees being laid off last fall. However, the company said it is hiring 60 people for positions created by the new emphasis on digital media.
Advance, a newspaper chain owned by the Newhouse family, has made similar decisions to cut back its daily print editions in favor of expanded online operations at its papers in other states, including the New Orleans Times-Picayune and its newspapers in Alabama, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
In an article Sunday, the newspaper reported that the Syracuse Media Group will provide news, advertising and marketing for the Post-Standard and its affiliated website, Syracuse.com, while its sister company, Advance Central Services, would print the newspaper and other publications, as well as provide accounting, customer service and human resources support.
As of Sept. 30, the Post-Standard had an Sunday circulation of 130,921 and a Monday-Friday circulation of 73,311, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
Firm disavows Cuba-Venezuela cable
HAVANA - Spanish telecom Telefonica denied Tuesday that it has anything to do with an undersea fiber-optic cable between Cuba and Venezuela, even as an analyst who monitors global data traffic noted an additional uptick in data speed to and from the island - suggesting the cable is in full operation.
In a brief statement, Telefonica SA acknowledged that it provides service to Cuba’s state-run phone company, ETECSA, but disavowed any connection to the ALBA-1 cable, which was completed in February 2011.
“Telefonica has no involvement with the submarine cable ALBA-1, which links Cuba with Venezuela,” chief press officer Miguel Angel Garzon said in the statement.
Telefonica was responding to a report by Internet intelligence firm Renesys, which noted faster data traffic to the island via Telefonica beginning last week, and concluded that it meant Cuba was using the fiber-optic cable.
- The Associated PressNebraska governor OKs pipeline route
LINCOLN, Neb. - Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman has approved a new route for the Keystone XL oil pipeline that avoids the state’s environmentally sensitive Sandhills region.
Heineman sent a letter Tuesday to President Barack Obama confirming that he would allow the project to proceed in his state.
The pipeline has faced strong resistance in Nebraska from a coalition of landowners and environmental groups who claim it would contaminate the Ogallala aquifer, a major groundwater supply.
Canadian pipeline developer TransCanada and some workers’ unions say the project is safe and will create thousands of jobs.
The original route would have run the pipeline through a region of erodible, grass-covered sand dunes. The new route skirts that area.
- The Associated Press
Business, Pages 24 on 01/23/2013