Penn State Defendants Ask for Details on Charges

Three former high-ranking Penn State officials, all accused of covering up abuse allegations against convicted serial child molester Jerry Sandusky, are seeking additional details on the charges they face.

Penn State Defendants Ask for Details on Charges

Three former high-ranking Penn State officials, all accused of covering up abuse allegations against convicted serial child molester Jerry Sandusky, are seeking additional details on the charges they face.

Study Details Graft in European Union

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Penn State Defendants Ask for Details on Charges

Three former high-ranking Penn State officials, all accused of covering up abuse allegations against convicted serial child molester Jerry Sandusky, are seeking additional details on the charges they face.

DealBook: Madoff Trustee Adds Details to Suit Against Financier

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DealBook: Energy Regulator Details Case Against JPMorgan

China Details Allegations Against Glaxo

The company also late Thursday named Hervé Gisserot, one of the company’s top executives in Europe, to succeed Mark Reilly as the head of its operations in China. Mr. Reilly left the country for London after the company’s offices were raided by the police in late June.

The company said Mr. Reilly was not a target of the bribery and corruption investigation and would remain at the company to help conduct an internal review of the China operation.

On Friday, new details in the case were presented in interviews published by Xinhua, the official state-run news agency in China.

According to those reports, several Glaxo employees have confessed to bribing doctors with gifts, travel, lecture fees and cash bonuses to persuade them to prescribe more of the company’s drugs. In some cases, the Glaxo employees reportedly said, doctors were compensated for conferences or lectures that never took place.

One 35-year-old Glaxo employee told Xinhua she regularly visited doctors’ offices to offer assistance and even “to meet their sexual desires,” according to the report.

The government has said it has detained four Chinese-born senior executives from Glaxo’s China operations. Xinhua reported Friday that 18 more Glaxo employees have been held in the city of Zhengzhou, in Henan Province in eastern China.

Although no formal charges have yet been filed against Glaxo or its employees, the scandal has been a huge embarrassment for the company in one of its fastest-growing markets.

Glaxo’s top executives in London have apologized and pledged to cooperate with Chinese investigators.

In a conference call after the company released its earnings on Wednesday, its chief executive, Andrew P. Witty, called the accusations against his company’s China operations “deeply disappointing.”

Glaxo also said on Friday that Steve Nechelput, a British national and the company’s head of finance in China, was no longer being barred by the authorities from leaving the country.

The scandal appears to be part of a broader crackdown on bribery and corruption in China. The Chinese government has sent investigators to other global pharmaceutical companies operating in the country. Officials have also begun to review drug pricing policies and question doctors and hospital employees about whether they have accepted bribes.

In Glaxo’s case, the government accused the company of using travel agencies to help funnel bribes to doctors, hospitals and government officials. The company was also accused of committing tax fraud and cheating consumers with artificially high drug prices.

In interviews with the state-run news media, Glaxo sales representatives said they had been trained in how to increase drug sales by bribing and entertaining doctors and that some of this was done through the use of fake invoices.

One hospital employee told Xinhua that a Glaxo representative, identified only by the surname Wang, offered bribes for business.

“After we got familiar, Wang visited me during festivals, treated me to dinner and bought me gifts,” the hospital employee said. “When our department held events, Wang also paid the bill.”

Google Wants to Release Details on Classified Requests

SAN FRANCISCO — Google on Tuesday asked the government for permission to reveal details about the classified requests the technology company receives for the personal information of foreign users.

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It is the first time that Google has publicly acknowledged that it has received requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which forbids companies from acknowledging the existence of requests or revealing any details about them. The technology company added that it complies with far fewer of these requests than it receives.

Google made the request after revelations of the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program, known as Prism. The data the government collects as part of Prism – including email messages, telephone records and online chats -- is legally authorized by FISA.

Google made the request in a letter from David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, to Eric H. Holder, the attorney general, and Robert S. Mueller, the director of the F.B.I.

In the letter, Mr. Drummond expressed frustration that the company has been unable, because of a government gag order, to explain the details of how it shares user data with the government. He asked for permission to publish both the number of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, that Google receives, and their scope.

“Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made,” Mr. Drummond wrote. “Google has nothing to hide.”

Mr. Drummond was unavailable for an interview. In a statement, Leslie Miller, a Google spokeswoman, said that of Google’s hundreds of millions of users worldwide, “only a tiny fraction” are subject to government data requests each year.

“If we could publish those numbers openly, as we are asking, they would show that our compliance with these national security requests falls far short of the claims being made,” Ms. Miller said.

Survey Details Data Theft Concerns for U.S. Firms in China

BEIJING — A quarter of companies that are members of a leading U.S. business lobby in China have been victims of data theft, a report by the group said Friday, as ties between Beijing and Washington have become increasingly strained over the threat of cyberattacks.

Twenty-six percent of the members who responded to an annual survey said that their proprietary data or trade secrets had been compromised or stolen at their China operations, according to the report from the business lobby, the American Chamber of Commerce in China.

“This poses a substantial obstacle for business in China, especially when considered alongside the concerns over I.P.R. enforcement and de facto technology transfer requirements,” the chamber said, referring to weak enforcement of intellectual property rights.

Mandiant, a U.S. computer security company, said in February that a secretive Chinese military unit was likely behind a series of hacking attacks that targeted the United States and stole data from more than 100 companies.

That set off a war of words between Washington and Beijing.

Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, Democrat of Maryland, said last month that U.S. companies had suffered estimated losses in 2012 of more than $300 billion due to the theft of trade secrets, much of it the result of Chinese hacking.

China says the accusations lack proof and that it is also a victim of hacking attacks, more than half of which originate from the United States.

Hong Lei, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, called the survey a “completely irresponsible action.”

“We hope the relevant side doesn’t politicize financial and trade problems, does not exaggerate the so-called issue of online leaks and does more conducive things for China and the United States,” Mr. Hong told reporters Friday.

The survey by the chamber, commonly known as AmCham, was conducted among 325 members across China late last year, before the release of the Mandiant report.

Only 10 percent of companies in the survey said they would use China-based cloud computing services, with most citing security concerns. Blocked Internet searches in China had impeded business for 62 percent of respondents.

U.S. officials have pressed China to address Internet attacks and cyberspying against U.S. companies. President Barack Obama raised hacking concerns in a phone call with President Xi Jinping of China earlier in March.

A recent assessment by U.S. intelligence leaders said that for the first time, cyberattacks and cyberespionage had supplanted terrorism as the top threat.

Most companies in the AmCham survey expressed optimism about the business outlook in China, with many reporting higher profit margins for their China units. But companies gave lower expectations for future investment and cited rising labor costs as a top concern. Perceptions that China’s investment environment is stagnating are increasing, according to the survey.

Member companies “have not felt over the last four or five years that there have been commercially significant positive changes in the business environment or the investment environment,” Christian Murck, president of AmCham China, told reporters.

“When you have an economy which is making a transition to a market economy, but which is not yet there, there is a feeling that if you are not moving forward with an indicated path of future policy that you are effectively moving backward,” he said at a briefing on the survey.

The survey also cited a steep increase in concerns over the protection of intellectual property, like copyrights and trademarks, with 72 percent of respondents saying enforcement in China was ineffective or totally ineffective, an increase of 13 percentage points over last year.

Perceptions that technology transfer was increasingly a requirement for access to China’s market also jumped 10 points to 37 percent, the chamber said, with higher rates of concern reported in the aerospace, automotive, chemical in information technology sectors.