Sabatini and Associates, LLC Attorneys at Law :: Newington :: Hartford :: Connecticut

The Supreme Court has allowed a multibillion-dollar federal lawsuit from South African blacks and others to proceed. The suit claims U.S. and foreign companies should be held liable for helping the former white-led apartheid government.Four members of the high court were forced to remove themselves from consideration of the cases. Under federal rules, at least six justices must hear a case that is accepted for review. With four of the nine recused, the high court had no choice but to uphold the lower court ruling.

The lawsuits seek judgments against three dozen U.S. and foreign companies totalling as much as $400 billion to South African blacks and others who say they suffered under that country’s official policy of oppressive separation of the races between 1948 and 1994.

The case is American Isuzu Motors Inc. v. Ntsebeza (07-919). 

Investors in Charles Schwab’s ultra-short bond funds the Schwab YieldPlus Fund Investor Shares (Symbol: SWYPX) and the Schwab YieldPlus Fund - Select Shares (Symbol: SWYSX) may be entitled to recover their investment losses. Charles Schwab marketed its YieldPlus funds as safe investments that would provide “higher potential returns than money market funds, with only marginally higher risk.” Charles Schwab also represented that its YieldPlus funds were designed to provide “high current income with minimal changes in share price,” and that this objective would be accomplished by investing in a “well-diversified” portfolio of bonds with durations of one year or less. But the YieldPlus mutual funds have decreased in value by 25% during the first quarter of 2008. That performance is far worse than the performance of money market funds and other ultra-short bond mutual funds during the same period. The funds were over-concentrated in risky mortgage-backed securities that contained subprime mortgage loans. The Funds also invested heavily in collateralized debt obligations. If you lost money in a Schwab YieldPlus fund please contact us for a free case evaluation.

Allstate Insurance has for years kept secret documents on how to low-ball auto claims to keep profits high. Known as the McKinsey documents, they are now being highly sought by Florida insurance investigators who’ve launched a full scale look at the insurance giants rate-making and claims-paying practices. Florida’s Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty has suspended Allstate from doing business in the state after the company failed to turn over information on its business practices. An appellate court lifted the ban.  A company spokesman tells the Tampa Tribune that Allstate will turn over the McKinsey documents, but they only concern auto insurance, not homeowners and they contain ideas that never became company policies. The McKinsey documents get their name from the consulting firm McKinsey & Co that Allstate hired in the early 1990s to help draft its business practices. A few lawyers who have sued Allstate have seen them. Most have protective orders from the court guarding the “trade secrets” of Allstate and cannot release them to the public. McKinsey and Co. also allegedly created documents about how to handle homeowners insurance, also highly sought by trial attorneys in property insurance litigation.  The documents have been succesfully used by lawyers in proving bad faith claims against Allstate.  However, the lawyers that have received the documents are under protective orders preventing the disclosure of the documents.