In this month's legal updates, experts at law firm Gateley plc examine a number of accounting cases including the Court of Appeal ruling in BTI 2014 LLC v Sequana SA & ors on dividend payments, directors’ duties and defrauding creditors, HMRC preferred creditor status and share sale agreements under bad leaver provisions

This month’s roundup of accounting stories include new SRA rules for law firms, CIPFA’s first financial management code, IFRS 8 consultation responses, Kier’s accounting error, a football accounting foul, Metro asset risk, PwC’s £5.6bn Steinhoff probe, call for better public sector reporting in Scotland

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has published technical advice on the minimum information content of documents describing a takeover, merger or division where a prospectus is not required

Irish travel software company Datalex has revealed a string of ‘significant accounting irregularities’, after it asked PwC to conduct an independent review of accounting issues relating to revenue recognition and the application of IFRS 15, which were first identified in January

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has fined Goldman Sachs International (GSI) £34.3m for failing to provide accurate and timely reporting relating to 220.2m transaction reports over a ten-year period

Debbie Green, vice president of ERP at Oracle, discusses how finance teams can declutter, improve their productivity and feel more joy using the KonMari approach

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has published its annual report on the enforcement and regulatory activities of accounting enforcers within the EU, and has indicated next year’s focus will continue to be on non-financial reporting as well as the implementation of new IFRS standards

Scottish five-a-side football club operator Goals Soccer has revealed further details of ‘significant’ accounting errors, with around £12m of VAT misdeclared, and has asked for temporary suspension from trading on AIM, pending clarification of the company’s financial position

The level of fraud in businesses is growing exponentially but the only way to get to grips with the scale of the problem is to drill down to the fundamental reasons why it happens and risk factors for finance departments, says Arun Chauhan, founder and managing director of Tenet Compliance & Litigation

CIPFA is consulting on a proposed new financial management code (FM code), which aims to drive improvement in financial management for all local authorities in the UK, marking the first time many areas of local government financial management have been codified

Solicitors’ firms are to be inspected to ensure they are meeting anti-money laundering obligations, with the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) revealing it will be carrying out checks on a sample of 400 law firms

The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has confirmed new regulations, which include simpler accounting rules for client monies under the SRA Accounts Rules, due to come into effect on 25 November 2019

Swiss bank UBS has been fined £27.6m by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for failings relating to 135.8m transaction reports filed over a ten-year period, which breached the regulator’s rules regarding the information required to identify potential market abuse and financial crime

The Pensions Research Accountants Group (PRAG) has published guidance on how pension scheme accounts need to account for their equalisation liabilities for guaranteed minimum pensions (GMPs) following the Lloyds judgment on pension equality

A probe by PwC into accounting irregularities at South African retail giant Steinhoff International, which owns Poundland in the UK, has uncovered some €6.6bn (£5.6bn) of errors over an eight-year period