Business digest 05/18/04

India's stock market suffers record fall

NEW DELHI -- Angry investors chanted "Down with Sonia Gandhi" outside India's stock exchange Monday, blaming the country's prime minister-in-waiting for a panic that led to the biggest one-day plunge in the market's 129-year history. Since Thursday, when Parliament election results showed Gandhi's Congress party would be able to govern only with support from pro-labor, anti-privatization communists, India's capital markets have bled some $45 billion, brokers estimate. The outflow culminated in what TV newsmen called "black Monday." Regulators closed the markets twice: Rules require suspension of trading when stock values change more than 10 percent in a day.

Lucent fined $25 million to settle allegations

WASHINGTON -- Lucent Technologies Inc. was fined $25 million by securities regulators Monday in settlement of civil fraud allegations that it failed to fully cooperate in an investigation of its accounting. The Securities and Exchange Commission also charged nine current and former executives of the telecom equipment maker with securities fraud and aiding and abetting Lucent's alleged violations of securities laws in the accounting irregularities. In a civil lawsuit filed in federal court in Newark, N.J., the SEC alleged that Lucent "fraudulently and improperly" booked some $1.1 billion in revenue in 2000. Lucent neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.

-- From wire reports