Billion, Lawsuit Settlement | featured news

A judge on Tuesday approved a set of settlements among Lehman Brothers entities that will allow the company's defunct brokerage to pay back about $15 billion in customer claims.

There have been nearly 17,000 victims of clergy sexual abuse since 1950 and legal settlements for their suffering continue to climb. Add another $10 million to the $2.5 billion that the Catholic Church in the USA has spent in confronting the clergy sex abuse crisis.

Ten major banks and mortgage companies agreed Monday to pay $8.5 billion to settle federal complaints that they wrongfully foreclosed on homeowners who should have been allowed to stay in their homes.

Bank of America agreed on Monday to pay more than $10 billion to Fannie Mae to settle claims over troubled mortgages that soured during the housing crash, mostly loans issued by the bank's Countrywide Financial subsidiary.

A $10 billion settlement to resolve claims of foreclosure abuses by major lenders is expected to be announced on Monday, several people with knowledge of the discussions said.

Toyota Motor Corp. has agreed to pay between $1.2 billion and $1.4 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit filed in 2010 over allegations of unintended acceleration in some of its vehicles.

HSBC, the British banking giant, will pay $1.9 billion to settle a money-laundering probe by federal and state authorities in the United States, a law enforcement official said Monday.

BP will pay approximately $4.5 billion and plead guilty to criminal charges as part of a settlement with the U.S. government over the deadly Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the London-based oil giant announced Thursday.

The U.S. brokerage unit and a European unit of the former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc said they settled a dispute over $38 billion in asset claims, a major step toward customers and creditors recovering money.

Big U.S. banks in talks with state prosecutors to settle claims of improper mortgage practices have been offered a deal that may limit their legal liabilities in return for a multibillion-dollar payment, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.