Good morning. The Trump administration blacklisted more than a dozen individuals, their businesses and tankers alleged to have been involved in as much as 40% of Venezuela’s crude-oil exports in recent weeks. The U.S. Treasury Department, announcing the sanctions Thursday, alleged the operations formed an effort by the Maduro regime to siphon state resources into personal accounts.

A senior U.S. Treasury official said a much longer list of vessels had been planned, but emergency action taken by the private sector to stop Venezuela transactions prompted the administration to prune the list. The Treasury also took two of four companies and their tankers recently sanctioned by the U.S. off its blacklist, because it said the companies cut their ties to Venezuela. The official said the action showed the effectiveness of the administration’s broader campaign to cut off funding to the regime of President Nicolás Maduro as companies responded by cutting business ties to the country.

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The action targeted a Mexico-based trade company called Libre Abordo S.A. de C.V. that signed contracts with Venezuela’s state companies to ship food to the country in exchange for crude exports. The company sold oil worth roughly $300 million in recent weeks, but hasn’t shipped any food to Venezuela, the Treasury alleged.

The operations were orchestrated by Colombian businessman Alex Saab, according to the Treasury. Mr. Saab was detained last week in the African island nation of Cape Verde by officials acting on an Interpol notice issued after his indictment in the U.S. for alleged money-laundering offenses last year, a U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman said.

Deutsche Bank will pay $9 million to settle claims stemming from an outage in 2016 of its swaps reporting platform, the U.S.’s derivatives market regulator said Thursday.

The fine by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission appears to close the book on longstanding issues related to information the bank is required to provide regulators about its swaps reporting business. Deutsche Bank also agreed to pay a civil penalty of $1.25 million to settle separate claims related to a type of market manipulation known as spoofing by two Tokyo-based traders.

• Philip Morris International said Thursday there is still a need for collaborative efforts against illicit cigarette trade, as a new report produced by KPMG underlined the changing nature of the problem in the European Union.

A bankruptcy court in Illinois ruled that the force majeure provision in a restaurant lease excuses the tenant’s obligation to pay full rent during the time a stay-at-home order was implemented to slow the spread of Covid-19.

The force majeure clause, also known as the “act of God” clause, is meant to protect businesses when an event outside their control prevents them from meeting their contractual obligations. The ruling appears to be the first of its kind after widespread closures triggered dozens of lawsuits across the country over missed rent payments. It could signal that other courts could pass similar judgments that are friendlier to tenants, lawyers said.

• The Defense Department canceled contracts with a company that incinerated more than 2 million pounds of materials containing toxic “forever chemicals” from firefighting foam in upstate New York over the past two years. The material burned at the Norlite incinerator in Cohoes, N.Y., came from 25 states, including dozens of military sites that have used aqueous film-forming foam, known as AFFF, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.
   
• Chinese prosecutors have formally indicted two Canadian citizens on espionage charges, more than 18 months after the men were first detained, advancing a pair of cases widely seen as retribution for Canada’s arrest of a well-connected Chinese Huawei executive.
   
• The Environmental Protection Agency said it won’t regulate perchlorate in public water supplies, reversing a decision by the Obama administration to mandate limits on the toxic chemical used as an additive in rocket fuel.
   
• Andrew Tyrie plans to step down as chairman of the U.K.’s competition regulator, citing “inherent limits” of the position. Mr. Tyrie intends to leave his post in September after just over two years on the job, the Competition and Markets Authority said in a statement.
   
• President Trump nominated attorney Caroline Crenshaw to fill a vacant seat on the Securities and Exchange Commission, the White House said Thursday. Ms. Crenshaw, 38 years old, currently serves as a senior counsel at the SEC and was picked by Senate Democrats to fill a spot that former commissioner Robert Jackson vacated earlier this year.

Shares in troubled payments company Wirecard AG crashed Thursday after auditors said they couldn’t locate €1.9 billion ($2.1 billion) of the company’s cash. Germany-based Wirecard, one of the biggest and fastest-growing European fintech companies, delayed publication of its annual report and said its management board was working with auditor Ernst & Young GmbH to clarify the situation. The revelation shook investors, and the company’s shares dropped by nearly two-thirds, wiping out $9 billion in market value in a matter of hours.

The company said the auditor informed it that “no sufficient audit evidence could be obtained” on the €1.9 billion belonging to the company that was supposed to be held in trust accounts. The amount equals about one-quarter of the value of Wirecard’s balance sheet.

A prominent advertising agency is advising clients to support an ad boycott against Facebook that was recently called for by civil-rights groups, a move that comes amid growing tensions between Madison Avenue and the social network over how it polices its content.

In an email to clients on Thursday, 360i, a digital-advertising firm owned by ad giant Dentsu Group Inc., said it supports the July ad boycott that groups including the Anti-Defamation League and the NAACP called for against Facebook on Wednesday. The groups urged big advertisers to pull spending from Facebook for July to protest the lack of progress the social-media giant has made enforcing its policies around hate speech and misinformation.

Facebook, which on Thursday said it removed posts and ads for President Trump’s reelection campaign because they violated the social-media giant’s policy against “organized hate,” also laid out steps it said it would take to support black-owned businesses, black content creators and employees of color as protests across the U.S. and around the world have brought renewed attention to racial disparities.

• Californians will now be required to wear face-coverings in high-risk environments, according to new guidance from the state’s Department of Public Health released Thursday. The new measures come as a growing consensus shows the fast-moving virus is more likely to spread in close-up, person-to-person interactions for extended periods. Meanwhile, New York City prepared to begin the second phase of its economic reopening next week, allowing for workers to return to offices and restaurants to offer outdoor dining.
   
• Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell defended policy choices to invest in debts of riskier companies through emergency lending programs and to provide loans without conditions that firms maintain payroll, in a letter to congressional overseers released Thursday. A bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing for $120 billion in aid for restaurants that aims to prevent further closures and job losses due to the coronavirus outbreak.

European officials are pushing forward with plans to tax tech giants after the U.S. declared international talks on the issue to be at an impasse, raising the specter of trans-Atlantic trade conflict. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said Thursday that France will resume collecting a 3% tax on revenue from digital services if countries from around the world can’t agree on a system for reallocating tax revenues from tech giants by the end of 2020.

Separately, Paolo Gentiloni, the European Union’s economy commissioner, said that the bloc will also pursue its own digital-tax proposal next year if the multinational talks fail. Diplomats said EU leaders would likely discuss the U.S. decision and the impact on whether to push ahead with a digital tax at their June video summit on Friday.

Small and midsize companies are fighting a rising tide of cyberattacks largely out of public view, posing an underappreciated risk for the bigger companies and institutions that use their services.

Attacks on high-profile targets like hospitals, retailers and airlines typically make headlines. But analysts documenting the activities of increasingly savvy cybercriminals say they are hitting lesser-known targets harder, especially those closely linked with big, influential companies. That can ricochet across other, unrelated entities, disrupting businesses far removed from the actual hack.

• Businesses and government agencies in Australia are being targeted by a sophisticated state actor in a large-scale cyberattack, the country’s prime minister said, raising alarm that disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic is increasing the vulnerability of institutions.

• Small-business owners across the country are testing their workers to catch potential coronavirus outbreaks before they start, eager to keep their companies afloat as the U.S. economy and regions of the country reopen in varying stages. Small businesses, which typically have fewer financial reserves than large firms, are grappling with the logistics, costs and privacy implications of testing workers.
   
• A contractor making Covid-19 testing materials for the federal government has been assembling the items in unsterile conditions in a Texas warehouse where workers only intermittently wear protective gear, according to several former employees.
   
• T-Mobile US is cutting jobs faster than initially planned after its April merger with rival Sprint created a company with about 80,000 employees. Rival AT&T, meanwhile, has detailed plans to lay off thousands of workers as it moves through a cost-cutting effort launched late last year.

Mall owner Taubman Centers Inc. is fighting back to retain the $3.6 billion deal it had with Simon Property Group, arguing that the coronavirus pandemic doesn’t allow buyers to walk away because they “no longer like the deal they made.”

“This is a classic case of buyer’s remorse,” Taubman said in a court filing Wednesday, in response to Simon’s lawsuit to break the deal. Taubman has asked for an expedited hearing to prevent Simon’s attempt to “run out the clock” on the transaction, which would cause “irreparable harm” to its shareholders.

A Simon spokesman said the pandemic has disproportionately affected Taubman compared with others in the retail real estate industry and that the agreement gives it the right to terminate the deal. “Nowhere in its extensive legal filing does Taubman seriously contest that it was not disproportionately impacted,” said the Simon spokesman, adding that Simon Property looks forward to proving its case in court.

A small but growing number of employers have moved to observe Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S., as a company holiday. Plans to observe the June 19 holiday have moved swiftly across corporate America in the weeks following the killing of George Floyd.

Businesses ranging from Nike and Twitter to law firm Nixon Peabody and Spotify Technology announced that employees would have a paid day off. Target is closing its Minneapolis headquarters and offered time-and-a-half pay for hourly employees who work. Best Buy awarded employees a paid volunteer day that could be used Friday or another day this year and said Juneteenth would be a paid holiday in 2021.

• Rio Tinto said it will review how its iron-ore division tackles issues related to the heritage of indigenous people, after blasting ancient rock shelters during an expansion of its operations in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.