Business in brief: HP makes bid for storage provider
NEW YORK – Hewlett-Packard Co. is bidding $1.5 billion for data storage provider 3Par Inc., offering 33 percent more than what rival Dell Inc. agreed to pay for the company just a week earlier.
The tussle for control of 3Par comes as both HP and Dell have been looking to expand beyond personal computers in search of bigger profits. The company they both want to buy provides products for organizing data on corporate servers. Those tools could help either company go deeper into “cloud computing,” the growing practice of offering software on a subscription basis over the Internet.
Associated Press
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – California’s attorney general sued “tax lady” Roni Deutch for more than $34 million on Monday, alleging that her law firm regularly violates state law by making false promises that it will help people resolve disputes with the Internal Revenue Service.
Attorney General Jerry Brown contends that Deutch overstates her TV claims of winning tax battles with the IRS. She advertises a success rate of up to 99 percent, yet successfully reduces the amount of money her clients owe in taxes in just 10 percent of cases, the lawsuit says.
Deutch’s law firm referred calls Monday to attorney Alexander Collins, who did not immediately return a phone message from the Associated Press.
Brown is seeking a preliminary injunction to block what he alleges are unfair business practices and false advertising.
Associated Press
Briefcase
From wire reports
• Health giant Johnson & Johnson has issued its ninth recall of a consumer health product in a year, this time covering millions of 1 Day Acuvue contact lenses sold in Japan and two dozen other countries in Asia and Europe. The affected contact lenses were mostly sold in Japan and none were sold in the U.S. or Canada, the company said.
• A federal judge has granted final approval to a settlement between Countrywide Financial Corp. and millions of customers left at high risk for identity theft because of a security breach. Countrywide, now owned by Bank of America, will provide free credit monitoring for up to 17 million people whose financial information was exposed, according to the settlement approved Monday. That group includes anyone who obtained a mortgage and anyone who used Countrywide to service a mortgage before July 1, 2008.
• A man charged with selling secrets about finances at Walt Disney Co. pleaded guilty in federal court Monday to wire fraud charges and conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Yonni Sebbag, a citizen of Morocco, and his girlfriend, former Disney employee Bonnie Hoxie, were arrested in California in May in the insider trading case filed in New York.