Whistleblower News From The Inside -- October 2, 2017

By the C|C Whistleblower Lawyer Team

Alere to pay more than $13 million to resolve U.S. SEC probe – Alere Inc has agreed to pay more than $13 million to resolve charges that the diagnostic testing firm committed accounting fraud and made improper payments to foreign officials, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said on Thursday. The settlement with Alere resolved an investigation that began in 2015 before Abbott Laboratories agreed to buy the Waltham, Massachusetts-based company in a $5.3 billion deal expected to close later this year. Reuters

Israeli Nuclear Whistleblower Gets Offer to Live with Wife in Oslo – Norway offered on Friday to let Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu live in Oslo with his Norwegian wife, but she said it was unclear if Israel will allow him to travel. Vanunu, 62, married theology professor Kristin Joachimsen in Jerusalem in 2015 after first meeting in Israel almost a decade earlier. She applied for him to be allowed to come to Norway under rules for family reunification and a spokesman for the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration said permission had been granted. Business Insider/Reuters

Whistleblower Gets Job Back; Award Cut by $200K – A Santa Fe district court judge this week ordered that a former Northern New Mexico College employee who won a whistleblower lawsuit against the college be immediately reinstated to her previous position, or to one in which she is qualified at the same rate of pay, and awarded her attorney’s fees. But Judge Francis J. Mathew also cut back the amount the employee had been awarded previously by about $200,000. Melissa Velasquez, who had served as director of NNMC’s El Rito campus and earned approximately $85,000 in salaries and benefits prior to being fired in 2014, is still to receive more than $475,000 in lost wages, interest and emotional distress. That amount includes $200,785 in attorney’s fees that the judge awarded. Albuquerque Journal