Waymo Sues State DMV to Keep Robotaxi Safety Details Secret
Waymo, the driverless car company operating an autonomous taxi fleet in San Francisco, is suing the California Department of Motor Vehicles. The immediate issue: whether the company, owned by Google parent Alphabet Inc., can hide from the public safety-related information by designating it as a trade secret.
The topics Waymo wants to keep hidden include how it plans to handle driverless car emergencies, what it would do if a robot taxi started driving itself where it wasn’t supposed to go, and what constraints there are on the car’s ability to traverse San Francisco’s tunnels, tight curves and steep hills. Waymo also wants to keep secret descriptions of crashes involving its driverless cars.
Lionbridge Prevails in Trade-Secret Lawsuit; TransPerfect to Appeal
TransPerfect had alleged that Lionbridge owner, H.I.G. Capital, engaged in “fake bidding” to obtain trade secrets “under false pretenses” during the court-ordered auction of TransPerfect, a process that began in 2016. The legal battle culminated in 2017 with Phil Shawe, TransPerfect CEO, being permitted to buy out then-co-CEO, Liz Elting and, as a result, own the company outright.
Liberia’s Former Defence Chief Samukai to be Jailed for Embezzlement
The Supreme Court of Liberia handed down two-year prison sentences to former defense chief Brownie Samukai along with deputies Joseph Johnson and James Nyuman Ndokor after they failed to return one million euros worth of stolen money from a government pension account.
The funds were stolen from the Armed Forces of Liberia pension account during the mandate of former President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, when Samukai headed the defense ministry.
Medical Imaging Companies CEO Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison for $250 Million Health Care Fraud Run Via State Workers’ Comp System
The CEO of several Southern California-based medical imaging companies was sentenced today to 60 months in federal prison for running a scheme that submitted more than $250 million in fraudulent claims through the California Workers’ Compensation System for medical services procured through bribes and kickbacks to physicians and others.
From no later than mid-2013 to November 2016, Solakyan conspired with physicians and others to perpetrate a scheme in which physicians were paid bribes and kickbacks in exchange for the referral of workers’ compensation patients. The compensation offered to the corrupt doctors consisted of either cash or referrals of new patients in what is known as a “cross-referral” scheme.
Repeat Embezzler Sentenced to Prison for Stealing Nearly $300,000 from Her Employer
According to records filed in the case, between February 2010 and January 2017, Wright wrote some 120 fraudulent checks to herself and then disguised the payments in company books as if they were made to legitimate vendors. The fraud came to light when a new Chief Financial Officer at the company began questioning some of the entries. An FBI analysis of the accounts revealed that much of the money was clearly used for non-business expenses such as more than $78,000 in payments to Nordstrom, more than $17,000 spent with QVC (the home shopping network) and more than $20,000 spent at Costco.
Amazon Employee Pleads Guilty to Mail Fraud for Stealing More Than $273,000 In Merchandise
According to plea documents and today’s hearing, from June 2020 to September 2021, Wright executed a scheme to defraud Amazon by stealing merchandise worth over $273,000 from the company’s warehouse. Over the course of the scheme, Wright was employed as an Operation’s Manager at Amazon’s warehouse in Charlotte. Court records show that Wright misused his access to the company’s computers to target certain merchandise, particularly computer parts such as internal hard drives, processors, and graphic processing units, and shipped those items from the warehouse to his home address. As Wright admitted in court today, he then sold the stolen merchandise for profit to a computer wholesale company in California.