Business Ethics

Anthem Blue Cross, the state's largest for-profit health insurer, has agreed to pay a $1-million fine and offer new coverage -- no questions asked -- to 2,330 people it dropped after they submitted bills for expensive medical care. As part of a deal that the California Department of Insurance is set to announce today, Anthem also will offer to reimburse those people for medical expenses that they paid out of pocket after they were dropped.

I like Yelp. The review site can be a nifty way to check out a restaurant before risking a meal. But is Yelp also a shakedown racket for merchants? Some restaurant owners say the San Francisco company is unusually aggressive in trying to get businesses to pay hundreds of dollars in monthly "sponsorship" fees to improve their ranking in search results and to move their most positive review to the top of the page.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Netflix Inc. were accused of conspiring to create a monopoly for online video rentals in a consumer lawsuit alleging that the collusion drove up prices. The two companies agreed in 2005 that Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, would close its online rental business and refer customers to Netflix, which would promote Wal-Mart's DVD movie sales, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco.

The owner of the Glendale Galleria shopping mall has agreed to pay a $48-million legal settlement to developer Rick Caruso, owner of the competing Americana at Brand shopping complex. The settlement ends an appeal by Galleria owner General Growth Properties of a 2007 court decision ordering the company to pay Caruso's firm $89 million for trying to prevent a restaurant chain from locating in the Americana.

This battle of disc jockeys is playing out in court. The publishers of Scratch: the Ultimate DJ, an upcoming video game, have sued Activision Blizzard Inc. They accuse the Santa Monica game company of embarking on a "sinister strategy of intentional interference and unfair competition." In the suit, filed this week in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Genius Products Inc. and Numark Industries lay out a tale of alleged corporate intrigue and backstabbing.

When Pasadena-based Avery Dennison wanted to build its road and traffic business in China a few years ago, it hired people like Lily Tang. The Beijing homemaker had an asset the company craved: political connections. Tang's husband, Chen Qi, is a senior official at the China Communications and Transportation Assn., a quasi-governmental group led by former ministers.

New York state and city authorities are suing 26 banks and two accounting firms that did business with Countrywide Financial Corp., claiming that the companies failed to ensure that the beleaguered mortgage company was being honest with investors. The banks and accounting firms were added as defendants Friday in a class-action lawsuit already pending in California against Calabasas-based Countrywide. Two of the lead plaintiffs, New York State Comptroller Thomas P.

By all rights, Deborah Gregory should be sitting pretty: As a first-time author, she wrote the Cheetah Girls novels, a bubbly, 16-book series that became hugely popular with American tweens and teens. And she appeared to hit an even bigger jackpot when she sold the dramatic rights to the Disney Channel. Her breezy, street-smart tales of five girls chasing pop music careers were turned into two hit television movies, and a third is now being filmed in India.

Battles between authors and studios over "Hollywood accounting" are nasty, and almost never resolved in favor of the writer. Ernest Hemingway once noted that authors should drive up to the California border and throw their books over a fence while studio officials throw bags of money back over the fence. That, he said, should be the end of the transaction. Some of the biggest names in publishing, however, have ignored this advice.

One of the state's largest insurers, Health Net Inc. of Woodland Hills, sold individual policies with the promise of medical coverage while engaging in a secret and illegal scheme to drop patients if they needed expensive treatment, the Los Angeles city attorney contended in a lawsuit filed Wednesday.