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KGS Announces Filing of Securities Class Action Lawsuit
Class Action | 2007/09/10 03:01

Kahn Gauthier Swick, LLC ("KGS") has filed the first class action lawsuit against China Sunergy Co. Ltd. ("China Sunergy" or the "Company") (NASDAQ: CSUN) in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, on behalf of shareholders who purchased the common stock of China Sunergy in connection with the Company's IPO on or about May 17, 2007, or who purchased shares thereafter in the open market. No class has yet been certified in this action.

UNLESS A CLASS IS CERTIFIED, YOU ARE NOT PERSONALLY REPRESENTED BY COUNSEL UNLESS YOU RETAIN AN ATTORNEY.

China Sunergy, certain of its officers and directors, and the Company's underwriters are charged with including, or allowing the inclusion of, materially false and misleading statements in the Registration Statement and Prospectus issued in connection with the IPO, in violation of the Securities Act of 1933.

Particularly, the Complaint charges that China Sunergy raised over $107.52 million through the issuance of 9.775 million shares, despite the Registration Statement's false and misleading statements that the Company: (1) was a "leading manufacturer of solar cell products, as measured by production capacity" that was experiencing remarkable revenue growth; and (2) had secured a sufficient supply of polysilicon, a raw material necessary to the continued production of its solar cell products. Yet at the time of the IPO and unbeknownst to shareholders, the Registration Statement failed to disclose that China Sunergy was already having difficulty obtaining a sufficient supply of polysilicon, which foreseeably would have a near-term adverse impact on earnings.

On July 3, 2007, only weeks after the IPO, China Sunergy issued a press release announcing preliminary results for 2Q:07 well below guidance, and claimed that it could suddenly not obtain critical raw materials necessary for production and its revenue goals. The Company's press release stated that "the relatively tight supply of polysilicon affected the quality, quantity and delivery of wafers and drove up overall wafer prices in the spot market, resulting in increased pressure on China Sunergy's margins."

On this news, shares of China Sunergy fell nearly 25% in a single trading day, from a high of $14.90 on July 2, 2007, to a close of $11.28 the following day, on exceedingly high volume of 3.659 million shares. As the impact of China Sunergy's belated disclosures resonated in the market, shares of the Company continued to decline, to about $7.50 per share by August 23, 2007. Shares fell significantly lower days later, to below $5.00 per share -- on news that the Company's CFO was resigning -- after China Sunergy revealed a loss of at least $.14 per share for 2Q:07. In all, China Sunergy shares fell from $16.70 per share from the highs following the IPO, to a low of below $5.00 per share -- all within approximately 10 weeks.

If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff in this class action lawsuit, you must move the Court no later than November 9, 2007. Any member of the purported class may move the Court to serve as lead plaintiff through counsel of their choice, or may choose to do nothing and remain an absent class member. If you would like to discuss your legal rights, you may e-mail or call KGS Managing Partner Lewis Kahn, without obligation or cost to you, toll free 1-866-467-1400, ext. 100, or by email at lewis.kahn@kgscounsel.com. To learn more about this case or KGS, you may visit http://www.kgscounsel.com/case/case.asp?lngCaseId=5014. KGS focuses its practice on securities class action litigation, and has been appointed lead counsel in numerous federal securities class actions.



Community court idea is pondered for downtown
Breaking Legal News | 2007/09/10 02:59

The Downtown Council is working to install more social "software" to complement the hard investment being made in the new arena, entertainment district and residential projects.

Four years ago, the property and business group started the Downtown Community Improvement District, an additional layer of privately funded services to make the area cleaner and safer. It's up for renewal and many people think it has been as much help reviving downtown as the major construction projects.

Now, the group is working closely with the Municipal Court to establish what is referred to as a community court. The concept got started in New York City in 1993 as a way to more compassionately and effectively deal with petty street crime and associated public safety issues.

It's intended to intervene in the futile cycle of having police pick up the same individuals repeatedly for misdemeanor crimes such as public intoxication and harassment, and then haul them to court where they'll perhaps serve a few days in jail before being released back to the street.

The community court approach identifies those individuals when they enter the criminal justice system. Rather than sending them off to jail, a case worker or similar professional shifts them to alternative programs such as drug and alcohol treatment or community service.

Say you're a chronic graffiti tagger. Rather than go to jail, a community court would return you to the neighborhood you trashed and require 40 hours of cleanup work.

"You don't solve crime, you come up with a better way to manage it and address quality of life issues," said Bill Dietrich, the president and CEO of the Downtown Council.

Sean O'Byrne, vice president of the council, said many people responsible for petty crime downtown often suffer from mental illness or addictions.

"The majority of individuals … end up anonymous on downtown streets, and downtown properties suffer as a result," he said. "This gives us a better tool to address the problem."

The community court approach also might help police do a better job keeping watch downtown and elsewhere.

Last December, Kansas City Police Chief Jim Corwin observed that homeless people contributed to downtown's image problem, and that, he said, was not necessarily a police issue.

"Am I supposed to arrest dirty people?" he asked at the time. "The homeless issue is a major downtown, urban problem. Cities that are successful have to take care of it holistically."

Corwin reaffirmed that idea last month when he decided not to enforce a new aggressive panhandling law approved by the Kansas City Council.

O'Byrne said a community court program would help police.

"They'll be able to spend less time booking people for the 20th time," he said. "We want them on the streets to protect people from more serious crimes. It's a time winner."

Dietrich and O'Byrne said Presiding Municipal Judge Elaine Franco is taking the lead on the issue. The judge could not be reached for comment, but last March she said a community court would work as well in Kansas City as other cities.

Franco supported a pilot community court program resolution being considered by the City Council.

"The consensus is that relatively low-level crimes that they are addressing in this resolution … should not be treated with a revolving-door concept approach," the judge said.

The council approved the resolution, but so far the program has not been implemented.



Google's top spot for sale, court told
Venture Business News | 2007/09/10 02:57

The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) is taking world-first legal action in the Federal Court against Google Inc over allegedly deceptive conduct related to sponsored links on its websites. The ACCC has brought a two-pronged case against Trading Post and Google - including subsidiaries Google Australia and Google Ireland - for potentially misleading consumers.

The consumer watchdog alleges Google does not do enough to differentiate "organic" search results - those ranked by relevance - from sponsored links which appear at the top of the results page.

In particular, the ACCC claims Trading Post breached the Trade Practices Act in 2005 when it used the names of NSW car dealerships Kloster Ford and Charlestown Toyota as hyperlinks to its own site.

These hyperlinks appeared in a shaded area titled "Sponsored Links" at the top of the results page, but appeared to be the dealerships' official sites, or at least affiliated with the dealerships, the watchdog said.

Christine Adamson SC, acting for the ACCC, said Trading Post had no such affiliation or link to either dealership.

The ACCC has previously said these dealerships compete with Trading Post for local car sales.

Trading Post chose the dealership names through AdWords, a Google commercial program that sets up hyperlinks.

AdWords linked any search on the dealerships' names to the Trading Post site through a link embedded in the search results.

Trading Post then paid Google "per click", Ms Adamson said.  "That's how we found out about it," she told Justice Jim Allsop.

"Kloster Ford was so outraged by the conduct that they contacted the (consumer) advocate."

The second thrust of the case concerned Google Inc's encouragement of this deceptive conduct by allowing sponsored sites to appear at the top of the list of search results, and in the same format as the organic search results, Ms Adamson said.

"Google represents to the world that its search engine is so good that it can rank, out of the multitudinous entries of the world wide web, these entries in order of relevance of the user's query," she said.

"Part of that (reputation is) that it's not influenced by money, it's influenced by relevance."

Justice Allsop asked: "And that's misleading because there would be results put at the top which are placed there not by reference to relevance but because people have paid to have that?"

"Yes," Ms Adamson answered.

Google's counsel Anthony Bannon SC successfully argued for orders that the ACCC file summaries of its case against each of the parties, with Justice Allsop labelling its current claim "opaque and repetitious".

The judge also adjourned the ACCC's notice of motion to serve outside the jurisdiction, pending clarification on the precise involvement of Google Australia and Google Ireland.

Mr Bannon argued the case should only be brought against Google Inc, and not its subsidiaries, with the joining of foreign parties bringing the complications of foreign laws.

Justice Allsop adjourned the case for further directions in the same court on October 4.



Naked Montclair carpenter not guilty
Court Watch | 2007/09/09 23:04

Carpenter Percy Honniball enjoys practicing his craft in the nude and, according to at least one Alameda County Superior Court judge, there is nothing legally wrong with that.

Judge Julie Conger found Honniball not guilty of indecent exposure Thursday for being naked while he worked in a Montclair home last year.

Honniball, who has a history of not wearing clothes while working, was caught in the buff in 2005 as he made repairs to the home. A neighbor had called police.

At the time, Honniball, 51, said he was more comfortable working naked and didn't want to get his clothes dirty as he sawed wood and nailed cabinets together.

Police arrested Honniball for indecent exposure, a crime that includes public nudity and acting lewdly by intending to direct attention to one's genitals for sexual gratification.

If convicted of indecent exposure, a person could be sentenced to a year in jail and be required to register as a sex offender.

While there is no dispute Honniball was naked, Conger found that the carpenter was not acting lewdly, nor did he attempt to bring attention to his genitals for the purpose of sexual gratification.

"What he learned was that you can get in trouble even when you do legal things," said David Beauvais, Honniball's attorney. "Even though there is a reaction, on the part of some people, to nudity . . . it is not enough to charge somebody with this."

Honniball could not be reached for comment, but last year he said in an interview, "The primary reason is so I won't dirty my clothes and have to get into my truck with dusty clothes on. "It's more comfortable," he said.

Honniball knew working in the nude caused problems.

The carpenter was caught three times working naked in Berkeley. In 2003, he was given two years probation for violating Berkeley's ban on public nudity.

Oakland does not have such a ban.

"For Honniball, he feels that it facilitates his work; he has better range of movement," Beauvais said. "I could tell you some stories about nail guns, but we won't get into that."



Weil, Gotshal & Manges opening Hong Kong office
Law Firm News | 2007/09/07 09:04



New York law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges plans to open an office in Hong Kong in October to serve its private equity and corporate clients.

The office, which was approved by the Hong Kong authorities in August, will have five attorneys: two New York partners, Akiko Mikumo and Peter Feist; a Shanghai partner, David Meredith; and two associates. The group will focus on private equity and project finance, Feist said.

The 1,200-attorney Weil firm, whose private equity clients with Chinese operations include Bain Capital and Providence Equity Partners, is the last of the five largest New York firms to open in Hong Kong.

"In order to get the most out of our Asia practice, we had to be in Hong Kong," said Mikumo, who is a member of the firm's management committee and will be managing partner of the new office. "Once you're in Shanghai, you need to be in the key financial centers."

The firm, which opened its Shanghai office three years ago, intends to use Hong Kong as its base for representing clients in Asia. Weil has plans to open an office in Beijing next and is in the process of applying for a license. Tokyo "would be a natural next step," Mikumo said.

Feist said: "There are so many foreign investors asking about doing business in mainland China and how to deal with the regulatory environment. The whole modus operandi is so different from how U.S. businesses are run."

Though the U.S. subprime crisis has virtually halted private equity activity in the United States, Feist said he was not worried about the firm's prospects in Hong Kong.

"I don't expect the private equity firms to stop looking at the opportunities in Asia," said Feist, who moved to Hong Kong on Monday.

The firm's clients did not ask the firm to open an office in Hong Kong, though "private equity clients had voiced their concern," Mikumo said.

The Hong Kong office will look to hire additional lawyers, including intellectual property and general corporate practitioners, after the opening, she said.

"We're going to start modestly," Mikumo said. "It's easy to hire laterals if you have an office there. The firm wanted people from the home office to start operations."

Weil, whose clients include General Electric, Reuters, Johnson & Johnson and Koch Industries, had revenue of $1.05 billion in 2006, the ninth-highest among U.S. law firms, according to the trade publication American Lawyer.

Weil was fourth among legal advisers to principals in mergers and acquisitions deals involving private equity in 2007, according to Bloomberg data. The firm provided advice on 48 deals worth a total of $129.7 billion. Sullivan & Cromwell is first with $205.7 billion in private equity deals.

http://www.weil.com



Court Denies Class Status for Plaintiffs Against Merck
Class Action | 2007/09/07 08:51

New Jersey's Supreme Court rejected on Thursday a class-action lawsuit against Merck & Company over the drug maker's withdrawn painkiller Vioxx. The ruling is a huge legal victory for the company, which faces nearly 27,000 individual lawsuits from people claiming that Vioxx, once a widely used arthritis treatment, caused heart attacks and strokes.

The state's highest court, reversing two lower court decisions, ruled that a nationwide class was not appropriate for the lawsuit. The suit had been brought by a union health plan on behalf of all insurance plans that paid for Vioxx prescriptions, or about 80 percent of all Vioxx sold.

A lawyer for the New Jersey union said that because the state's consumer fraud law allows for triple damages, the case could have cost Merck $15 billion to $18 billion. The company's annual revenue last year was $22.6 billion.

Had the class action been allowed to proceed, it also would have been a major setback to the company's strategy of fighting the Vioxx lawsuits individually. Of the cases that have reached verdicts, Merck has won nine and lost five. A new trial was ordered in one case, and two others ended in mistrials this year.

Shares of Merck, which is based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., rose more than 2 percent, to $50.47, Thursday.

"We were thrilled with the decision," said John Beisner, who argued the case for Merck.

Christopher A. Seeger, lead lawyer for the plaintiff, the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 68 in West Caldwell, N.J., said he would pursue separate claims on behalf of individual health plans. He said that the high court did not rule that the state's consumer fraud law could not be applied to health plans from other states, so those claims could still be pursued in New Jersey, with the possibility of triple damages.

"Merck temporarily dodged a bullet," he said. "Merck didn't totally dodge the bullet."



Court Strikes Down Key Patriot Act Power Again
Breaking Legal News | 2007/09/07 06:53

A U.S. District Court struck down a key provision of the Patriot Act as unconstitutional Thursday, marking the second time that a provision which allows anti-terrorism investigators to write their own subpoenas for phone and internet records and require the recipients to never speak of them violated the First Amendment.  The ruling (.pdf) strikes yet another blow at the FBI's use of National Security Letters, which were used to issue 143,074 requests for phone and internet records from 2003 to 2005, and as a recent Inspector General report showed, the widespread use led to abuses and sloppiness. Early this year, a damning report by the Justice Department's Inspector General found that the FBI used NSLs in violation of applicable NSL statutes, Attorney General guidelines and internal FBI policies. The FBI, along with the Inspector General, are now criminally investigating an office that sent more than 700 emergency letters, with false statements in them, to phone companies.

The ACLU sued on behalf of an anonymous internet service provider, which was served an NSL about one of the websites it hosted.  The ISP contested the order, which the FBI subsequently dropped, but the ISP remains unable to even acknowledge that it got a request, and the company's president said he's been forced to lie to his friends and girlfriend about it.

Judge Victor Marrero of the Southern District of New York ruled that the gag order and the strict rules about how to contest them amounted to prior restraint on speech and allowed the FBI to pick and choose which persons would be gagged, based on whether the feds believed the target might speak critically of the government.  Judge Marrero found, in a 106 page opinion, that the gag order provisions couldn't be struck down without affecting the rest of the statute so he found that the entire NSL provision was unconstitutional.  He also stuck down a provision that prescribed the standards courts should use in judging the FBI's arguments for keeping gag orders.  Marrero wrote that Congress had overstepped its bounds in setting out those standards.



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Class action or a representative action is a form of lawsuit in which a large group of people collectively bring a claim to court and/or in which a class of defendants is being sued. This form of collective lawsuit originated in the United States and is still predominantly a U.S. phenomenon, at least the U.S. variant of it. In the United States federal courts, class actions are governed by Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule. Since 1938, many states have adopted rules similar to the FRCP. However, some states like California have civil procedure systems which deviate significantly from the federal rules; the California Codes provide for four separate types of class actions. As a result, there are two separate treatises devoted solely to the complex topic of California class actions. Some states, such as Virginia, do not provide for any class actions, while others, such as New York, limit the types of claims that may be brought as class actions. They can construct your law firm a brand new website, lawyer website templates and help you redesign your existing law firm site to secure your place in the internet.
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