• The Court of Cassation last week accepted an appeal against a part of the judgement in the case of speech technology firm Lernout and Hauspie, which went bankrupt in 2001 and was later found to have artificially inflated its performance figures. Six of those convicted in the case, including managing director Jo Lernout (pictured), appealed to the Cassation court, which accepted only an appeal regarding a package of 51,000 shares owned by Lernout and director Nico Willaert. The package had been seized from a bank in the Netherlands and declared forfeit by the court. That ruling will now have to be revisited by the Antwerp appeals court.

• Lucien Verkest and his son Jan, whose business was at the origin of the dioxin crisis in 1999, have lost an appeal against their two year sentences. The Verkests were found to be delivering animal feed to farmers that was contaminated by machine oil. The crisis had a severe impact on the meat industry, with seven million chickens and 60,000 pigs destroyed. It also led to the resignation of two ministers.