SEC EXPANDING OVERSEAS

It has been a tough year so far for Foxconn. With 12 employee suicides and the latest news of significant first half losses, 2009 is shaping up to be a year the company would likely want to forget. Hoping to leave this past behind, the company now has plans to shift its coastal operations inland. BON’s Kelda Yuen has more on Foxconn’s next move and what the decision means for the company and its workers.

Now there's been some heated online debate here following the news that a U.S. telecommunications company has been fined for paying millions of dollars in bribes to Chinese officials. UTStarcom, a maker of telecommunications equipment, has agreed to pay $3 million in fines to settle civil and criminal charges with federal regulators.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said the company's China subsidiary paid nearly $7 million between 2002 and 2007 for 225 overseas trips by employees of its customers. The trips were purportedly for training, but regulators say many of them were to tourist destinations, like Las Vegas and Hawaii.

The Commission also accused the company of spending more than $4 million on expense-paid programs for Chinese government customers at U.S. universities. The case of UTStarcom has not gone unnoticed here in China.

In today's Blog of the Day we look at a post by newspaper columnist Sheng Dalin who has written a blog about this on the popular news portal Ifeng.com.