The Ministry of Justice's consultation on its draft Bribery Act guidance includes principles of good compliance and clarifications on bribes. The ministry has also released five illustrative examples on key danger areas, such as hospitality.

The French strikes and demonstrations over a proposed increase in the retirement age have lasted for weeks and attracted wide sympathy in a society whose work force is less than 10 percent unionized. But the proposal will soon become law, setting the stage for confrontations with France’s unions, which continue to starve the country of gasoline, diesel and other petroleum products, and are pressing for demonstrations afterward, the International Herald Tribune reported.

With the recent boom in the issuance of European high yield bonds, complex pari passu senior secured loan / high yield bond combination financings have become more prevalent. In these financings, there is a need to balance the interests of senior lenders and high yield bondholders who, really for the first time, now find themselves at the same level in the capital structure and sharing security. While the market is clearly still evolving, a number of recent deals have taken a similar approach on one of the most difficult intercreditor issues – control over security enforcement.

Workers at Breckland Council in Norfolk may soon have to clock in and out using flexi-time cards each time they go for a cigarette break. Defending the policy, the Council explained that it was suggested following staff consultation and is felt necessary in order to address issues of unfairness amongst smokers and non-smokers. If approved, the new rules will apply from 1 November 2010. Nottingham City Council dropped a similar policy after a trial period and it remains to be seen whether this is a suitable solution to issues of perceived unfairness between smokers and non-smokers at work.

The recently enacted UK Bribery Act 2010 (“Bribery Act”), which will become fully effective and enforceable in Spring 2011, constitutes a sweeping revision and expansion of the United Kingdom's anticorruption legislation. It creates broad prohibitions on both public sector and commercial bribery for essentially any company or person with a connection to the United Kingdom. The jurisdictional reach of the Bribery Act is otentially profound and generates the need for any company with operations in the UK to closely valuate its anti-corruption compliance policies and procedures.

Louise Verrill and Sonya Van de Graaff overview some of the imaginative uses of current insolvency and Company legislation since the insolvency of Lehman Brothers

This call for evidence invites people to have a say on how the existing consumer credit and personal insolvency regimes might be improved and seeks views on a number of Coalition commitments, including: * tackling unfair bank charges; * introducing a seven-day cooling off period for store cards; * introducing a power for a regulator to cap interest rates on credit and store cards; and * requiring credit card providers to make electronic statements available to enable consumers to judge whether an alternative credit card would provide better value for money.

As the government of Prime Minster George Papandreou struggles to get the nation’s financial house in order — reducing the size of its bloated civil service, chasing after tax evaders and overhauling its pension system — it has also begun to tackle a much less talked about problem: the cozy system of “closed professions” that has existed here for decades, costing the economy billions of dollars a year, The New York Times reported.

Greek labor tensions heightened Thursday, as a railway strike caused travel chaos and police and workers clashed outside the country's most revered archeological treasure, The Wall Street Journal reported. The protest in the Greek capital represented yet another wave of dissent as the government tries to drag the country out of an unprecedented debt crisis and recession.