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Court: Ukraine can try to avoid repaying $3B loan to Russia
U.S. Court News |
2023/03/15 14:38
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The U.K. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Ukraine can go to trial to try to avoid repaying $3 billion in loans it said it took under pressure from Russia in 2013 to prevent it from trying to join the European Union.
The court rejected an attempt to avoid a trial by a British company acting on Russia’s behalf to collect the loans. Ukraine said it borrowed the money while facing the threat of military force and massive illegal economic and political pressure nearly a decade before Russia invaded its neighbor.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted that the ruling was “another decisive victory against the aggressor.”
“The Court has ruled that Ukraine’s defense based on Russia’s threats of aggression will have a full public trial,” he tweeted. “Justice will be ours.”
The case was argued in November 2021, and the court was not asked to consider Russia’s invasion of Ukraine three months later.
Ukrainian authorities allege that the corrupt government of pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych borrowed the money from Moscow under pressure before he was ousted in protests in February 2014, shortly before Russia illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula.
After the 2014 Ukraine revolution, the country’s new government refused to repay the debt in December 2015, saying Moscow wouldn’t agree to terms already accepted by other international creditors.
The case came to British courts because London-based Law Debenture Trust Corp. had been appointed by Ukraine to represent the interests of bondholders. The company initially won a judgment to avoid trial but Ukraine appealed.
The Supreme Court rejected several of Ukraine’s legal arguments, including that its finance minister didn’t have authority to enter into the loan agreement and that Ukraine could decline payment as a countermeasure to Russia’s aggressions.
The ruling, however, said a court could consider whether the deal was void because of threats or pressure that are illegitimate under English law.
While the court noted that trade sanctions, embargoes and other economic pressures are “normal aspects of statecraft,” economic pressures could provide context to prove that Russia’s threats to destroy Ukraine caused it to issue the bonds. |
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Executive gets 15 months in prison in doomed nuclear project
Court News |
2023/03/06 20:50
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A former executive utility who gave rosy projections on the progress of two nuclear power plants in South Carolina while they were hopelessly behind will spend 15 months in prison for the doomed project that cost ratepayers billions of dollars.
Ex-SCANA Corp. Executive Vice President Stephen Byrne apologized in court Wednesday, saying he thinks about how he let down customers, shareholders, employees, taxpayers and his family almost every day.
The two nuclear plants, which never generated a watt of power despite $9 billion of investment, were supposed to be “the crowning achievement of my life,” Byrne said. “But I failed.”
Byrne is the second SCANA executive to head to prison for the nuclear debacle. Former CEO Kevin Marsh was sentenced to two years in prison in October 2021 and released earlier in March after serving about 17 months.
Two executives at Westinghouse, which was contracted to build the reactors, are also charged. Carl Churchman, who was the company’s top official at the Fairfield County construction site at V.C. Summer, pleaded guilty to perjury and is awaiting sentencing. Former Westinghouse senior vice president Jeff Benjamin faces 16 charges. His trial is scheduled for October.
Both defense lawyers and prosecutors agreed to delay Byrne’s prison sentence until he testifies at Benjamin’s trial to make sure he is honest and helpful.
But that isn’t in doubt. Prosecutors said Byrne was the first executive to come to investigators after the project was abandoned in July 2017. His careful notes taken in every meeting of who spoke and what was said saved the government years of work unraveling the lies, prosecutor Winston Holliday said.
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Mexican president lashes out at Supreme Court chief justice
Court News |
2023/03/01 10:32
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Mexico’s president lashed out Wednesday at the chief justice of the country’s Supreme Court, accusing her of promoting rulings favorable to criminal suspects.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s comments opened a new debate over the separation of powers in Mexico, at a time when the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the president’s controversial cuts to election agency funding.
López Obrador has already attacked independent regulatory agencies, slammed the judiciary and cut funding for the National Electoral Institute.
The electoral dispute has led the president to feud with the press, demonstrators and the U.S. State Department. Opponents say the electoral cuts threaten Mexico’s democracy, and have appealed them to the Supreme Court.
López Obrador’s comments Wednesday opened a head-on conflict between the administration and Supreme Court Chief Justice Norma Piña, the first woman to hold that post.
The president was angered after a judge issued an injunction striking down an arrest warrant against Francisco Garcia Cabeza de Vaca, a former governor of the northern border state of Tamaulipas, who had been accused of corruption.
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US Court strikes down charter boat tracking rule
Law Firm Press |
2023/02/24 15:03
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An appeals court has struck down a federal fisheries management rule requiring operators of privately owned charter boats to equip their vessels with tracking devices, a victory for a group of Louisiana and Florida charter operators who challenged the rule in a 2020 lawsuit.
Thursday’s ruling by a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans reversed a lower court decision upholding the regulation, which had been developed to help regulators keep track of the amount of fish caught on recreational charter vessels.
Rejecting government arguments, the panel said that tracking devices are not the type of equipment regulators can require on recreational vessels under a federal fishing regulation law passed by Congress — the Magnuson-Stevens Act.
And it said regulators, in adopting the rule, failed to adequately consider charter operators’ concerns that the regulation may violate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. While not ruling on the regulation’s constitutionality, the opinion written by Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod said it “very likely violated the Fourth Amendment.”
Charter operators have complained that the requirement imposed a costly, needless burden on charter operators. Lawyers for the operators say charter operations account for a tiny percentage of fishing done in the Gulf of Mexico.
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