WASTED TIME - PepsiCo Inc. and Bottling Group were hit with a wage-and-hour class action Wednesday in New York Southern District Court. The suit was filed by Klafter Lesser LLP on behalf of current and former non-exempt hourly employees who allege they were not paid for all hours worked after a ransomware attack led to an outage on the timekeeping software used by the defendants. Counsel have not yet appeared for the defendant. The case is 7:22-cv-02370, Marshall v. Pepsico, Inc., et al. Stay up on the latest deals and litigation with the new Law.com Radar.
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NOTHING BUT TROUBLE - Legal problems continue to surface for Chinese telecommunications equipment maker ZTE Corp., even after a U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade of the Northern District of Texas ended the company’s five-year probation from a 2017 guilty plea and billion-dollar fine. The ruling was issued March 22, the final day of ZTE’s probation for illegally shipping U.S. technology to Iran and North Korea. ZTE pleaded guilty in 2017 and paid a penalty of $892 million to the U.S. But, as Law.com International’s Jessica Seah reports, ZTE has not steered clear of trouble since its 2017 guilty plea. In 2018, the U.S. Commerce Department found that ZTE had made false statements about disciplining executives who were involved in orchestrating illegal shipments to Iran. Also in 2018, ZTE was separately accused of violating its probation over an alleged conspiracy to bring Chinese nationals into the U.S. to conduct research at ZTE. The company also faces a pending personal injury lawsuit. The action, brought on behalf of American service members and civilians who were killed or wounded while serving in Iraq between 2011 and 2016 and their families, accuses ZTE of aiding terrorists in Iraq by evading international sanctions. Even the recent favorable ruling in the Northern District of Texas came with encouragement from Kinkeade for the U.S. government to pursue any reasonable charges and criminal or civil penalties against ZTE.
