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The Morning Risk Report: Israel-Gaza Conflict Spurs Bitcoin Donations to Hamas
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Members of Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, held a rally on May 27 in the southern Gaza Strip. PHOTO: ASHRAF AMRA/ZUMA PRESS
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Good morning. The Palestinian militant group Hamas has seen a surge in cryptocurrency donations since the start of the armed conflict with Israel last month, a senior official with the group said, exploiting a trend in online fundraising that has enabled it to circumvent international sanctions to fund its military operations.
The international attention to the recent fighting drew new eyeballs to websites run by Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and that surge translated into donations for its military operations, the senior Hamas official said. “There was definitely a spike” in bitcoin donations, he said. “Some of the money gets used for military purposes to defend the basic rights of the Palestinians.”
[Continued below...]
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Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, is designated by the U.S., the EU and other Western nations as a terrorist entity. Those sanctions forced it to turn years ago to covert methods of financing outside the international banking system. As the cryptocurrency industry grew, Hamas began capitalizing on its ability to make transactions anonymous.
The Hamas official, who spoke on condition he not be named, declined to say how much cryptocurrency the group has received but said its proportion of overall revenue was rising. Last year, U.S. federal authorities seized more than $1 million in cryptocurrency tied to the al-Qassam Brigades.
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Foreign Bribery Official Discusses Voluntary Disclosures, Data Analytics
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Companies are continuing to self-report potential instances of foreign bribery despite the fact that few have been publicly rewarded for doing so in recent years, a U.S. Justice Department official said.
“We've had a pretty steady stream of voluntary disclosures,” Daniel Kahn, acting chief of the department’s fraud section, said Wednesday during a virtual conference on the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act hosted by the American Conference Institute.
Under a policy launched in 2016, the Justice Department will consider declining to prosecute a company that voluntarily discloses possible violations of the FCPA, and takes certain other steps. When it does so, it will issue a letter publicizing the so-called declination.
The department issued five such declinations in 2016, but only three in 2019 and 2020 combined. Mr. Kahn said to expect more soon. “I think you're going to see a number of Corporate Enforcement Policy declinations coming out this year or next year,” he said.
Mr. Kahn also spoke about the emerging use of data analytics by companies to root out corruption.
“There are a lot of companies that don't have the capabilities to do that yet, and we're not going to hold that against [them],” he said. “But certainly where companies are able to effectively utilize data, I think that's going to be to the benefit of the company and to the benefit of the compliance program.”
—Dylan Tokar
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SEC officials wrote Tesla in 2019 and 2020, saying that some of CEO Elon Musk’s tweets should have undergone the oversight required in a 2018 settlement.
PHOTO: MICHELE TANTUSSI/REUTERS
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The Securities and Exchange Commission has tried for several years to get Elon Musk to behave more like a typical corporate leader. It hasn’t worked.
The SEC sued Mr. Musk and Tesla Inc. in 2018 over tweets the regulator deemed fraudulent, settling the case for a combined $40 million and changes to the company’s corporate governance. As part of the deal, it also fashioned a unique way to restrain Mr. Musk’s social-media habit: forcing the company to preapprove any statement by its CEO that could move markets.
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Altria Group Inc. and the Federal Trade Commission are squaring off over allegations that the Marlboro maker engaged in anticompetitive practices ahead of its 2018 investment in e-cigarette startup Juul Labs Inc.
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The U.S. said Wednesday it will impose tariffs on the U.K. and five other countries in response to their taxes on U.S. technology companies, but will suspend the levies for six months as it seeks to negotiate an international resolution.
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FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia said that the volume of cyberattacks arrayed against companies means future incidents are inevitable. PHOTO: POOL/REUTERS
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A rash of cybercrimes against companies and critical infrastructure requires a muscular response from the U.S. government, even as companies themselves must take steps to combat attacks, executives and cyber officials say.
Ransomware has become an intolerable situation in many nations, Kevin Mandia, chief executive of cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc., said during the WSJ Pro Cybersecurity Executive Forum on Wednesday.
“Pharmaceuticals, hospitals, healthcare, public companies, organizations that don’t have the talent and skills to defend themselves—they’re getting sucker punched,” Mr. Mandia said.
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A ransomware attack against JBS SA sent shock waves throughout the U.S. food industry and exacerbated tension between Washington and Moscow, even as the meatpacker restarted plant operations.
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Ferry service between mainland Massachusetts and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket was slowed Wednesday by a ransomware cyberattack, officials said.
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The upstart hedge fund already had won two board seats at Exxon’s annual shareholder meeting last week. PHOTO: LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS
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An activist investor is likely to pick up a third seat on the board of Exxon Mobil Corp., giving it additional leverage to press the oil giant to address investor concerns about climate change.
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Choosing your own job title is one of the freedoms of being an entrepreneur. But be careful—the title you choose can make a difference in how you are perceived.
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Tyson Foods Inc. replaced its chief executive officer after about eight months on the job as the top U.S. meat company contends with production constraints and fallout from Covid-19.
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An ad agency owned by entertainment marketing company Endeavor is investing in Obsidianworks, a new marketing shop founded by the actor Michael B. Jordan and ex-Nike marketing executive Chad Easterling, the companies said. The deal is among the latest to back a minority-owned firm as the ad industry comes under pressure to diversify its ranks.
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Ally automatically waived overdraft fees between March and July 2020. PHOTO: GABBY JONES/BLOOMBERG NEWS
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Overdraft fees are a thing of the past at Ally Financial Inc. Customers who overdraw their accounts will no longer face a $25 penalty, the bank said Wednesday. The change applies to the roughly 3.6 million checking, savings and money-market accounts at Ally’s online bank. Typically, Ally charged for each day that a customer tried to buy something when their account was more than $10 in the red, except on debit-card transactions.
Ally decided to eliminate the fees after positive customer feedback when it temporarily suspended the charges in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, said Diane Morais, Ally Bank’s president of consumer and commercial banking. Last summer’s protests for racial justice also drove the decision to nix the fees, she said. The charges disproportionately affect people who are living paycheck to paycheck, Ms. Morais said, and the bank also studied research that found that overdraft fees disproportionately affect Black and Latino households.
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Energy prices across the OECD’s members were 16.3% higher than a year earlier. PHOTO: GEORGE FREY/GETTY IMAGES
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Consumer prices across the rich world rose at the fastest pace in more than 12 years during April, as central bankers try to figure out whether shortages that have emerged as the global economy reopens will prove transitory or have long-lasting consequences.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Wednesday said consumer prices in its 36 members, which are mostly rich countries, were 3.3% higher than in April 2020. That was the largest increase since October 2008.
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A doctor checked on patients receiving home treatment for coronavirus infections in Caracas, Venezuela, in April. PHOTO: LEONARDO FERNANDEZ VILORIA/REUTERS
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Health-sector advocates and rights organizations say Venezuela is greatly underreporting the pandemic’s toll in a country where the regime has long been accused of hiding and manipulating health data, arresting doctors who publicize deficiencies in hospitals and failing to report on epidemics to international organizations.
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The Persian Gulf island nation of Bahrain, battling a sharp resurgence of Covid-19 despite high levels of inoculation with a Chinese-made vaccine, has started giving booster shots to vulnerable citizens using a different vaccine made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, a senior official said.
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Memorial Day will be the first major test of the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccinations in the U.S., according to many epidemiologists. Last year, reopenings in parts of the U.S. ahead of the holiday weekend led to a second surge of new coronavirus cases. Hospitalizations climbed in late June, followed by a steady rise in fatalities after the first week of July.
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The European Union, Canada and other developed countries have signed deals to get hundreds of millions of doses of Covid-19 vaccines and boosters over the next two years, furthering a divide between rich and poor countries.
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