Tyco International will pay nearly $3bn - a record for a single firm - to settle claims from disgruntled shareholders that the company’s leadership engaged in a massive accounting fraud scheme and overstated income by $5.8m.

The Bermuda-based company had fought the class-action litigation for five years, claiming that it had been as much a victim as the shareholders. Hundreds of lawyers worked on the case, taking 200 depositions and generating 80m pages of documents.