Wells Fargo CEO Takes Responsibility For ‘All Unethical’ Practices; Reuters via Huffington Post, 9/20/16

Reuters via Huffington Post; Wells Fargo CEO Takes Responsibility For ‘All Unethical’ Practices:

"The chief executive officer of Wells Fargo & Co on Tuesday apologized for the bank’s opening as many as 2 million bogus customer accounts that could generate fees for the lender.

“I accept full responsibility for all unethical sales practices,” CEO John Stumpf told a congressional panel...

[Ohio. Sen. Sherrod] Brown said employees were caught “forging signatures, and stealing identities, Social Security numbers, and customers’ hard-earned cash, so as to hang on to their low-paying jobs and make money for the high-paying executives at Wells Fargo.”"

‘You should resign': Elizabeth Warren excoriates Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf; Washington Post, 9/20/16

Jena McGregor, Washington Post; ‘You should resign': Elizabeth Warren excoriates Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf:

"In at least a couple of instances, she used the bank's own words against him. She began by reading from the bank's "vision and values statement," which says "we believe in values lived, not phrases memorized," and "if you want to find out how strong a company's ethics are, don't listen to what its people say. Watch what they do."

So, she said, "let's do that," noting Stumpf had repeatedly said "I'm accountable." Then she drilled into questions where he was unable to affirmatively answer that he had resigned, handed back money he'd earned or fired any senior executives."

Mitsubishi Motors Says False Mileage Tests Done Since 1991; Associated Press via New York Times, 4/26/16

Associated Press via New York Times; Mitsubishi Motors Says False Mileage Tests Done Since 1991:

"Mitsubishi Motors Corp., the Japanese automaker that acknowledged last week that it had intentionally lied about fuel economy data for some models, said an internal investigation found such tampering dated to 1991...

Japan is periodically shaken by scandals at top-name companies, including electronics company Toshiba Corp., which had doctored accounting books for years, and medical equipment company Olympus Corp., which acknowledged it had covered up massive losses.

Mitsubishi Motors struggled for years to win back consumer trust after an auto defects scandal in the early 2000s over cover-ups of problems such as failing brakes, faulty clutches and fuel tanks prone to falling off dating back to the 1970s. That resulted in more than a million vehicles being recalled retroactively."

VW Presentation in ’06 Showed How to Foil Emissions Tests; New York Times, 4/26/16

Jack Ewing, New York Times; VW Presentation in ’06 Showed How to Foil Emissions Tests:

"A PowerPoint presentation was prepared by a top technology executive at Volkswagen in 2006, laying out in detail how the automaker could cheat on emissions tests in the United States.

The presentation has been discovered as part of the continuing investigations into Volkswagen, according to two people who have seen the document and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal action against the company. It provides the most direct link yet to the genesis of the deception at Volkswagen, which admitted late last year that 11 million vehicles worldwide were equipped with software to cheat on tests that measured pollution in emissions.

It is not known how widely the presentation was distributed at Volkswagen. But its existence, and the proposal it made to install the software, highlight a series of flawed decisions at the embattled carmaker surrounding the emissions problem."

The case of the missing Whole Foods yogurt; Philly.com, 3/5/16

William Bender, Philly.com; The case of the missing Whole Foods yogurt:

"The lawsuit, which was consolidated in Austin, hit a snag last month when the judge ruled against the plaintiffs because they had not conducted FDA-compliant testing, which requires samples from 12 cases of yogurt. Whole Foods could face legal ramifications if it destroyed all of the yogurt, making the stringent FDA test impossible.

"We can't do the test because they destroyed the stuff we needed to do the test," Osefchen. "My hope is, they can't get away with that."

Friday's motion accuses Whole Foods of "intentional destruction" of evidence and "knowingly concealing" it for 16 months.

"They knew they had a big mountain of yogurt," the attorney said. "It took hundreds of people to pull it off the shelves. They had to send it somewhere.""

Parmesan cheese you sprinkle on your penne could be wood; Bloomberg News via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2/16/16

Lydia Mulvany, Bloomberg News via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Parmesan cheese you sprinkle on your penne could be wood:

"Acting on a tip, agents of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration paid a surprise visit to a cheese factory in rural Pennsylvania on a cold November day in 2012.

They found what they were looking for: evidence that Castle Cheese Inc. in Slippery Rock was doctoring its 100 percent real Parmesan with cut-rate substitutes and such fillers as wood pulp and distributing it to some of the country’s biggest grocery chains...

Some grated Parmesan suppliers have been mislabeling products by filling them with too much cellulose, a common anti-clumping agent made from wood pulp, or using cheaper cheddar, instead of real Romano.

Castle president Michelle Myrter is scheduled to plead guilty this month to criminal charges. She faces up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine.

German brewers protect their reputations with Reinheitsgebot, a series of purity laws drawn up 500 years ago. Champagne makers prohibit most vineyards outside their turf from using the name. Now the full force of the U.S. government has been brought to bear defending the authenticity of grated hard Italian cheeses."