Business News Roundup, Aug. 2
Virgin Galactic says it has received an operating license for its space tourism rocket from the Federal Aviation Administration.
Virgin Galactic says the operating license awarded by the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation will ultimately permit commercial operations.
The company said Monday the licensing process involved a review of the system’s design, safety analysis and flight trajectory analysis.
The taxi test evaluated and calibrated navigation and communications telemetry systems as it was pulled by a sport utility vehicle.
A Nigerian accused of scamming $60 million from companies around the world through fraudulent emails has been arrested after months of investigation, Interpol and Nigeria’s anti-fraud agency said Monday.
The ringleader of a global scamming network, identified only as 40-year-old Mike, was arrested along with a 38-year-old accomplice in Nigeria’s oil capital, Port Harcourt, in June, the statement said.
The man is accused of leading a network that compromised email accounts of small and medium-sized businesses around the world including in the United States, Australia, India, South Africa and Thailand.
The network involved about 40 people in Nigeria, Malaysia and South Africa who provided malware and carried out the frauds, with money-laundering contacts in China, Europe and the United States providing bank account details.
A supplier’s email would be compromised and fake messages sent to a buyer with instructions for payment to a bank account under the network’s control, the statement said.
Verizon says it plans to pay about $2.4 billion to buy Fleetmatics, which makes software used by cable companies, energy providers and others to manage their fleets of vehicles.
An engineering firm that was hired by insurance companies to evaluate damage caused by Superstorm Sandy was charged Monday with illegally altering reports prepared by inspectors in the field.
HiRise Engineering and one of the company’s project managers, Matthew Pappalardo, were charged with felony fraud.
The charges are the result of an investigation opened in 2014 by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman after lawyers for scores of New York and New Jersey homeowners filed civil lawsuits claiming that altered engineering reports had led to them getting less insurance money than they deserved.
In at least 25 cases, prosecutors allege that Pappalardo — who was not an engineer — had employees heavily edit field reports, sometimes in ways that substantially changed conclusions about the extent or cause of damage.
A woman who found her 77-year-old husband crushed to death under an all-terrain vehicle when she brought him lunch at his job cannot sue his employer for severe emotional injuries she suffered, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled Monday.
In an agreement with All Habitat Services, Velecela received $300,000 in workers’ compensation benefits for her husband’s death, but she also filed a lawsuit against the company alleging it was responsible for the emotional injuries she suffered.
The Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that Connecticut’s workers’ compensation law bars people from suing for negligent infliction of emotional distress if they receive workers’ compensation.