Accounting fraud

Steinhoff International Holdings NV Chairman Christo Wiese, seeking to stabilize the embattled retailer, is negotiating a standstill agreement on a 1.5 billion-euro ($1.8 billion) margin loan under which banks would suspend the sale of stock until next year, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

Steinhoff International Holdings NV bonds extended losses after Moody’s Investors Service slashed the credit rating to junk in the wake of an accounting scandal that’s threatening the survival of the global furniture and clothing retailer.

Steinhoff International Holdings NV plunged after its chief executive officer resigned amid accounting irregularities, rocking a company that’s rapidly expanded from its roots in South Africa into a retail empire spanning Australia, Europe and the U.S.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged the auditing firm Anton & Chia and several of its officials with fraud, accusing the Newport Beach, Calif.-based firm of conducting flawed audits and reviews of financial statements while violating securities laws.

Rio Tinto Group’s calamitous $3.7 billion coal deal in Mozambique keeps coming back to haunt the world’s second-biggest miner, three years after it unloaded the mine.

KPMG LLP said the head of its South African office and seven other senior executives quit after an internal investigation found that work done for the politically connected Gupta family fell “considerably short” of the auditing firm’s standards.

The former chief financial officer of American Realty Capital Partners Inc. was convicted of misleading investors by falsely inflating a key financial metric used to evaluate the performance of the real estate investment trust.

Proxy adviser Glass Lewis & Co. blasted Toshiba Corp.’s board for poor governance amid repeated scandals and recommended investors vote against all directors at the company’s shareholders meeting later this month.

A unit of Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp. is the focus of criminal and civil probes by the Justice Department related to how it billed the government for contracting work, the company disclosed in a filing.

The right ethical structure in the workplace is critical to deterring fraud, according to James Ratley of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.