SiliconBeat

Robert Half International, the staffing services firm based in Menlo Park, was named as a defendant in a court case brought by a (we’re-presuming) former employee that alleges that temporary employees in California were “improperly denied expense reimbursement and wages for time purportedly spent preparing for interviews, and traveling to and attending interviews with, alleged clients of” Robert Half’s, according to a filing with the SEC last month.

The complaint was filed Read the rest of this entry »

MessageGlobalstar, the Milpitas company that bills itself as the world’s largest provider of mobile satellite voice and data services, won a legal victory Tuesday in a consolidated class action lawsuit over allegations that it misled investors in its November 2006 initial public offering with a registration filing that “contained material misstatements and omissions”.

The action, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, was “dismissed Read the rest of this entry »

Maxim Integrated Products, the Sunnyvale chip maker that hasn’t filed financial reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission since May 2006 because of an investigation into its past stock option granting practices, said Monday it reached a settlement of a shareholder lawsuit over the matter.

The legal action, brought against some of the company’s current and former executive officers and directors, included no admission of “wrongdoing or fault” on their part. Such settlements almost never do.

However, Read the rest of this entry »

3Com said in a filing today it has filed suit against Bain Capital Partners Thursday in an effort to collect a $66 million “termination fee” it says it is owed from the private equity firm after Bain terminated its planned acquisition of the former Silicon Valley company that’s now headquartered in Marlborough, Mass.

The $2.2 billion deal agreed to last September was terminated by Bain in March, a day before Read the rest of this entry »

The second line of the press release put out by Electronics for Imaging announcing a settlement of litigation against it relating to its “historic stock option granting practices” — translation: backdating — informs the reader that the agreement “does not contain any admission of fault or wrongdoing on the part of EFI or the individual defendants.”

But of course. Read the rest of this entry »

The Sunnyvale medical device company formerly known as Kyphon said it would pay $75 million to the U.S. to settle allegations that it “caused submission of false claims to Medicare” in a lawsuit initiated in 2005 in Buffalo, New York, and prosecuted by the U.S. Justice Department, but which was not revealed before yesterday. Now a division of Medtronic known as Medtronic Spine, Kyphon set aside money to cover such a payment prior to being acquired by Medtronic in November. Read the rest of this entry »

An online operation with offices in Mountain View and San Francisco that offered “free trials” of its herbal products, including smoking cessation patches, has agreed to halt its allegedly deceptive practices, pending trial, the Federal Trade Commission said today.

The FTC sued NextClick Media, claiming that “free” 10-day trials it offered for its herbal stop-smoking patches, in fact weren’t free, the patches didn’t work as claimed, and the operation was “illegally debiting consumers’ bank accounts without their authorization.” Read the rest of this entry »

Actel, the Mountain View supplier of low-power programmable chips, has agreed to a settlement of a derivative shareholder lawsuit brought against it in August 2006, according to a filing the company made Tuesday. The lawsuit alleged that certain former and current officers and director “breached their fiduciary duties, and were unjustly enriched in connection with the timing of stock option grants from 1996 to 2001.”

As part of the settlement, filed with U.S. District Court in San Jose, some of the defendants have Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, a former hourly employee at West Marine filed a lawsuit in California Superior Court in Orange County alleging “among other things, that (West Marine) failed to provide meal and rest periods, correct itemized statements, pay to discharged associates,” along with other allegedly unfair business practices, according to West Marine’s annual financial filing with the SEC.

Read the rest of this entry »