Before a federal judge, Justice Department prosecutors will lay out the dirty laundry of the company best known for its elegant Mercedes-Benz autos: a pattern of bribery that for many decades has helped fuel the company's sales and illicitly added millions of dollars to its profits. As a result, the company has agreed to pay $185 million in fines.

According to court papers filed March 24, the company's board 11 years ago adopted an integrity code with anti-bribery provisions. The problem is, Daimler failed to enforce it; many Daimler executives actively resisted it, and improper payments continued until 2008.

The court papers provide a case study of how executives at one of the world's blue chip companies responded when governments said "no" to bribery.

Of course, Daimler, through its subsidiaries, is hardly the first corporate giant to be caught paying off foreign officials to get contracts.

In December 2008, for example, engineering company Siemens AG agreed to pay more than $1 billion in fines in Germany and the U.S. after being accused of bribing officials with suitcases stuffed with money.

Ten years earlier, Germany ratified an international anti-bribery agreement; an implementing law took effect in early 1999.

Secured creditors are owed about $300 million by owners of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. They want to use that "IOU" to make a so-called "credit bid" for the company.

The auction is scheduled for April 27. A local group that includes current investor Bruce Toll, the housing company founder, and chemical company heir David Haas has made an opening $67 million bid.

A federal appeals panel issued a 2-1 decision this month that lets Philadelphia Newspapers deny creditors the right to bid with the money owed them. The lenders this week asked the full 13-judge court to hear their appeal, charging that the ruling upends decades of precedent and will disrupt the credit industry.

"The panel decision in this case represents a startling break with decades of established bankruptcy practice and a repudiation of basic principles of bankruptcy law," the creditors wrote in the 122-page motion filed Monday.

About a dozen banks and financial firms must defend allegations of bid rigging, limited competition and price fixing in the municipal derivatives market, a U.S. judge ruled on Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Victor Morrero's written order said the defendants, including Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, UBS AG, Morgan Stanley and others, should prepare for a pretrial conference on April 30.

The case is In Re Municipal Derivatives Antitrust Litigation, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 08-2516.

In 2006, the U.S. Justice Department, Internal Revenue Service and Securities and Exchange Commission launched a sweeping investigation into how the derivatives, known as guaranteed investment contracts, had been priced.

Municipal bond issuers had frequently parked their proceeds from debt sales by buying these contracts, which generate income, until they needed to spend the money.

While the investigation cooled down by early 2009, with information occasionally trickling out in the banks' and insurance companies' SEC filings, it has heated back up in the last few months. At the same time, a number of counties and cities have moved to sue the companies involved.

The decision Tuesday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit lifts the Federal Communications Commission's "cross-ownership" ban.

That restriction had remained in effect under a stay issued by the court in 2003 as it has tried to sort out legal challenges to attempts by two previous FCC chairmen, Republicans Michael Powell and Kevin Martin, to relax the rules.

The decision comes as the current FCC, now under Democratic control, gears up for its next congressionally mandated review of its media ownership rules. Those rules, which the agency must review every four years, include the cross-ownership ban and limits on the number of television and radio stations that one company can own in a market.

In the meantime, some media companies already own newspapers and television stations in the same market because they were grandfathered in when the rules were first put into place in 1974.

The current court case began when Powell tried to lift the cross-ownership ban in large media markets and raise the caps on TV and radio station ownership. That effort drew legal challenges from public interest groups that said he had gone too far and from media companies that said he had not gone far enough.

The Third Circuit sent the matter back to FCC, telling it to rewrite the rules. And that led Powell's successor, Martin, to try to ease the cross-ownership ban in big media markets — drawing more legal challenges from both sides.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc will ask a Canadian court on Wednesday to hear its appeal of a lower court decision allowing Shaw Communications Inc to buy the broadcast arm of bankrupt Canwest Global Communications Corp.

An Ontario Superior Court judge ruled on Feb. 19 that Shaw could acquire Canwest's television arm, putting a quick end to a last-minute bid for the assets, filed the night before by a consortium led by private equity fund Catalyst Capital and backed by Goldman.

The Catalyst consortium includes the Asper family, Canwest's founders. Leonard Asper was chief executive of Winnipeg, Manitoba-based Canwest, Canada's largest media group, until last Thursday when he stepped down to avoid potential conflict of interest concerns.

Goldman Sachs is a partner in Canwest's specialty TV arm after helping the media group acquire popular channels such as History Television and Food Network Canada from Alliance Atlantis in 2007 for C$2.3 billion.

It wants the Ontario Court of Appeal to set aside the deal that allows cable operator Shaw to buy the Canwest TV assets.

Nokia said on Monday it would defend itself vigorously against a class action complaint filed in the United States that claims the firm and its top executives hid some product delays from investors in 2008.

"Nokia has reviewed the allegations contained in the complaint and believes that they are without merit," the company said.

The City of Roseville Employees' Retirement System filed the case on Feb 5 against Nokia Corporation, chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, then-chief financial officer Rick Simonson and Kai Oistamo, head of Nokia's phone business.