Good morning. Alex Saab, a businessman accused by American prosecutors of creating a global network of companies to help Venezuela’s government evade U.S. sanctions, was extradited Saturday to the U.S., his lawyers said.

Mr. Saab was flown out of the West African island nation of Cape Verde on a Justice Department jet, his lawyers said, ending a 16-month battle for the Colombian-born deal maker. American prosecutors accuse Mr. Saab of having funneled more than $350 million from a range of Venezuelan government contracts through the U.S. financial system.

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On Saturday, with the extradition under way, the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro issued a statement saying that it “denounces the kidnapping of the Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab by the government of the United States.”

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida indicted Mr. Saab in 2019 on charges of using a Venezuelan state low-income housing program and a controlled foreign-exchange market to siphon off the money for his benefit and that of the Venezuelan officials that he and his associates allegedly bribed.

The U.S. Treasury Department also blacklisted Mr. Saab and his accomplices, including three of Mr. Maduro’s stepsons, for allegedly using the country’s food program and gold resources to launder stolen state assets. In Colombia, which is allied with the U.S. against Mr. Maduro, prosecutors said last year they were probing allegations that Mr. Saab laundered money for drug traffickers.

Charles Randell, the chair of U.K.’s main financial regulator, plans to step down from his position in the spring, the agency said.

Under Mr. Randell, the Financial Conduct Authority has made an effort to be a more proactive and data-driven regulator, it said.

The agency recently secured a guilty plea by a subsidiary of NatWest Group PLC in the first criminal prosecution under money-laundering regulations that went into effect in 2007.

Mr. Randell sent a letter to the head of the U.K.’s Treasury on Friday to begin the process of finding his successor.

—Dylan Tokar

Tether Ltd., the largest stablecoin issuer, agreed to pay a federal regulator a $41 million penalty, the latest result of the Biden administration’s broader crackdown on cryptocurrency markets. 

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission accused Tether of falsely claiming that it backed each of its crypto tokens with an equivalent amount of U.S. dollars. It marked the first time the CFTC has applied to a stablecoin the broad legal definition of a “commodity,” which gives the agency authority to police fraud and manipulation.

Federal law and ethics rules say judges must recuse themselves if they, their spouse or any minor children own even a single share of a company that is a plaintiff or defendant in a case before them.

Approval of an ETF that will buy bitcoin futures contracts—though not the coins themselves—would increase the cryptocurrency’s legitimacy and make it easier for institutional investors to get exposure. Four applications for bitcoin futures ETFs, submitted in August, are pending approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

• The former Boeing Co. employee charged with misleading air-safety regulators about a flight-control system that played a significant role in two deadly 737 MAX crashes is being unfairly blamed for the disasters, his attorney said.
   
• Chinese regulators approved Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s application to take full ownership of its local securities business, another step in China’s gradual opening of its financial system to major players from the U.S. and elsewhere.

Microsoft Corp. is shutting down LinkedIn in China following increased regulatory scrutiny, but the software giant has other businesses still exposed in the important market.

LinkedIn said it made the decision to shut down in China after “facing a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements.” Those same factors could lead Microsoft to pull out other products in China, said Paul Triolo, head of the global technology policy practice at Eurasia Group, a political-risk consulting firm.

• The sharpest consumer-price increases in years in many countries have evoked different responses from central banks. More than a dozen have raised interest rates but two that haven’t are those that loom largest over the global economy: the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. Their differing responses reflect differences in views about whether the pickup in prices will feed further cycles of inflation or will instead peter out.
   
• China’s economy grew 4.9% in the third quarter from a year earlier, slowing sharply from the previous quarter’s 7.9% growth rate, as power shortages and supply-chain problems added to the impact from Beijing’s efforts to rein in the real estate and technology sectors.
   
• China’s central bank sought to ease concern about potential contagion from China Evergrande Group’s debt crisis, saying the risk of the developer’s problems spilling over into the financial system was controllable.
   
• The European Union is considering new measures, including joint purchases of gas to build up the bloc’s strategic reserves, to help alleviate future energy crises like one the continent now faces.
   
• An energy price shock is serving as a reminder of the world’s continued dependency on fossil fuels—even amid efforts to shift to renewable sources of energy.

The volume of suspected ransomware payments flagged by U.S. banks has surged this year, on pace to nearly double last year’s, the Treasury Department said Friday, highlighting the scale of a problem that governments across the world have described as a critical national security threat.

Nearly $600 million in transactions were linked to possible ransomware payments in so-called Suspicious Activity Reports financial services firms filed to the U.S. government in the first six months of this year, according to a Treasury Department report. That is more than 40% more than the total for all of 2020.

• Chinese state media said the country’s tough new data-privacy laws would pose challenges for Futu Holdings Ltd. and Up Fintech Holding Ltd.The two online brokers, which are listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market, said they placed a priority on legal compliance and protecting customer information.
   
• A draft ruling from Ireland’s privacy regulator would require Facebook Inc. to change how it informs users about its data processing but disregards complaints that the social-media giant needs to obtain direct consent for its activities. If the decision is finalized, Facebook would also face a fine of between €28 million and €36 million (equivalent to $32.4 million to $41.7 million) for failing to be transparent with users.
   
• Facebook Says AI Will Clean Up the Platform. Its Own Engineers Have Doubts.

Netflix Inc. fired an employee who it said had leaked confidential financial information about the streaming giant’s controversial Dave Chappelle stand-up comedy special “The Closer” to Bloomberg News, the company said Friday. “We understand the employee may have been motivated by disappointment and hurt with Netflix, but maintaining a culture of trust and transparency is core to our company,” a Netflix spokesman said. The company didn’t identify the employee.

The leak of financial information, including the production costs for “The Closer,” came in the midst of a backlash among some Netflix employees over the content of the special, which includes remarks that many in the transgender community have found offensive.

U.S. workers left their jobs nearly 20 million times between April and August this year, according to the latest federal data, a number more than 60% higher than the resignations handed in during the same period last year, and 12% above the spring and summer of 2019 when the job market was the hottest it had been in almost 50 years.

The sheer number of quits helps explain why so many employers are struggling to fill hiring gaps, said Danny Nelms, president of the Work Institute, a consulting firm that conducts 40,000 exit interviews each year for companies.

• Dubai’s main cargo handler said it would stop accepting most imports of airfreight arriving at the emirate’s main airport as it rushes to reduce a backlog that has snarled processing and delivery of goods across the United Arab Emirates.
   
• Union leaders are pressing to increase their ranks and secure gains for their members as workers demand more from their employers and companies struggle with labor shortages and snarled supply chains.
   
• Uncomfortably high inflation will grip the U.S. economy well into 2022, as constrained supply chains keep upward pressure on prices and, increasingly, curb output, according to economists surveyed this month by The Wall Street Journal.

Send comments to the Risk & Compliance editor, Jack Hagel, at jack.hagel@wsj.com.

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