The insurer Aflac has become the first U.S. company to give shareholders a say on pay - a vote on top management's compensation. And in their first advisory vote Monday, they signaled that the compensation committee was doing a fine job.

Slightly more than 93 percent of shareholders approved of the $11.96 million compensation package that Daniel Amos, Aflac's chief executive for the last 18 years, received last year. Only 2.5 percent voted against.

"As he makes more money, I make more money," said George Nader, a shareholder in West Point, Georgia, who has been accumulating Aflac shares for more than 30 years. "The dividend keeps increasing and the shares have done well. The man at the top is thinking of the shareholders, and he deserves to be compensated for that."

Read the full article here on the International Herald Tribune website.

An insurance trade group said they expect an appeal of a Georgia trial judge’s ruling last week that found the state law capping awards for pain and suffering in medical malpractice cases was unconstitutional.

The American Insurance Association said the ruling, handed down by Fulton Count Court Judge Marvin S. Arrington Sr. in Atlanta on April 28, which found the cap on non-economic damages in medical liability cases to be illegal, dealt “a potentially serious blow to Georgia’s 2005 comprehensive tort reform law.”

Read the full article, authored by Daniel Hays, here on the National Underwriter website.

UBS axed 5,500 jobs and sold billions of dollars of ailing assets on Tuesday in a bid to break free from the subprime crisis, but its shares dropped as investors feared its earning power might be permanently stunted.

The Swiss bank said it would reduce its workforce by an additional 7 percent, with most of the cuts hitting U.S. and UK investment banking, as it sought to hack back the business lines that made it Europe's biggest casualty of the subprime crisis.

Federal prosecutors in New York have formed a task force together with other government agencies to examine the collapse of the market for risky home loans, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn said Monday.

The group is being run out of the federal prosecutors' office in Brooklyn, said Robert Nardoza, a spokesman for the office, formally known as the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York.

The task force is working with representatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the U.S. Secret Service, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Nardoza said.

The Federal Reserve announced Friday that it will expand a series of efforts to deal with the global credit crisis, in coordination with European central banks.

The Fed said it was boosting the amount of emergency reserves it supplies to U.S. banks to $150 billion in May, from the $100 billion it supplied in April. The Fed took this action and several other moves to boost credit in coordination with the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank.

Interpublic Group of Cos. says it reached a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on securities fraud charges.

As part of the settlement, subsidiary McCann-Erickson will pay a $12 million civil penalty.

He was tied this year to one of the largest securities scandals in history and faces charges ranging from forgery to unauthorized computer use, yet the former trader at French bank Societe Generale is gainfully employed, again.

Jerome Kerviel, who shook global financial markets when the bank revealed $7.14 billion in losses tied what it says were unauthorized trades, landed a new job as a computer consultant less than a month after his conditional release from prison.