Cuomo Subpoenas Five Bank of America Directors

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is said to have issued subpoenas to five current and former directors at Bank of America (BAC). He’s trying to determine which bank executives were aware of large losses and bonus payouts at Merrill Lynch just before the bank’s takeover last year. “A big unanswered question as we look back on the financial crisis is—where were the boards?” Cuomo told the New York Times in an e-mail. “Did the boards of directors of our largest financial institutions protect the rights of shareholders, were they misled, or were they little more than rubber stamps for management’s decision-making?” Investigators plan to grill the directors on how much they knew about Merrill’s losses and what specific roles they played in decisions about disclosing key information to shareholders, according to the paper’s source.

The founders of the Internet calling service Skype are “escalating their legal battle” with eBay (EBAY), says the New York Times. “Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who became billionaires after selling Skype to eBay in 2005, have filed a copyright lawsuit against Skype in United States district court in Northern California,” the paper says. In the court filing, they allege that eBay violated their copyright by changing and sharing the peer-to-peer source code behind Skype. The suit comes a little more than two weeks after eBay announced it would sell most of the company for $1.9 billion to investors led by a private equity firm.

British candy company Cadbury’s (CBY) chief executive sketched out ambitious growth plans yesterday, “defiantly ignoring the possibility that Cadbury has a future with Kraft (KFT) or another corporate suitor,” the Wall Street Journal reports. He said the company is well-positioned in emerging markets as well as in the chewing-gum business. Cadbury has benefited from the low penetration of private-label products in the candy, chocolate, and chewing-gum categories. A “recession-related trend toward small, affordable treats” also kept the confectioner healthy over the past year.

The Interior Department announced yesterday that it is ending an oft-criticized program that allows companies to give the U.S. government in-kind payments instead of cash for oil and natural gas taken from federal land and waters, the Washington Post reports. The royalty-in-kind program has been the center of controversy over poor enforcement that has cost the federal government millions in royalty payments. Not helping the case to keep the program: A sex and drug scandal involving employees of the office in charge of the department's offshore energy leasing program was uncovered last year.  

According to the L.A. Times, movie rental chain Blockbuster will close up to 960 stores by the end of next year. In a regulatory filing yesterday, the company—which is increasingly competing with Netflix and Redbox—said it might convert an additional 250 to 300 locations to outlets that would focus on used DVDs. While 18 percent of Blockbuster's stores are unprofitable, a whopping 47 percent are only “mildly profitable,” according to the filing.

Rolls-Royce has unveiled its new economy car—the eerily named Ghost model, priced at $245,000, says the Wall Street Journal. “Though the Ghost has the same hand-crafted interiors and famous grill, the sleeker and slightly shorter model costs about one-third less than the $380,000 starting price of the British car maker's flagship Phantom,” the paper says. The company, like many other luxury purveyors, has faced a “delicate balancing act” in efforts to boost sales while attempting to maintain the brand’s exclusive cachet.