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The Morning Risk Report: Justice Department Makes Quiet Push on Antitrust Enforcement
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The Justice Department has filed an aggressive antitrust challenge to a partnership between American Airlines and JetBlue. PHOTO: ETIENNE LAURENT/SHUTTERSTOCK
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Antitrust staffers are advancing investigations of business practices at Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google (which already is facing one Justice Department antitrust lawsuit) and Visa Inc. The department’s antitrust division also is deep into scrutinizing some high-profile pending mergers. Those include a publishing industry deal in which Penguin Random House’s parent company is seeking to buy Simon & Schuster, and UnitedHealth Group Inc.’s planned acquisition of health-care technology company Change Healthcare.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, speaking at the New Yorker Festival recently, described the antitrust division as “energized and eager to go forward,” saying the department had ongoing matters “involving everything from agriculture, to banking, to real estate.”
“We do think that ensuring fair competition is an essential element of our obligation to ensure that justice is done,” he said.
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WSJ Risk & Compliance Forum
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Join us Tuesday for the WSJ Risk & Compliance Forum. The virtual program includes sessions on anti-money-laundering laws, emerging risks, compliance and cryptocurrencies, lessons from Wirecard and workshops on ESG reporting and responding to ransomware. Register here.
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Chilean Prosecutors Open Criminal Probe Into Piñera Over Mine Sale
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Chilean prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into President Sebastian Piñera amid allegations of wrongdoing tied to the sale of a stake in a mining project.
Prosecutors said they will investigate whether bribery and tax crimes occurred during the sale of the Dominga mine project by Piñera’s family during his first term from 2010 to 2014.
Piñera denied wrongdoing after the contract, which was signed in the British Virgin Islands, was revealed in the Pandora Papers last week. He said he was not involved in the sale and had no knowledge of the deal.
—Ryan Dube
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The team working on the EPS initiative is part of the SEC’s enforcement division. PHOTO: ANDREW KELLY/REUTERS
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The Securities and Exchange Commission’s review of companies’ earnings per share has brought cases against three firms over the past year or so, and could come into greater focus under the regulator’s new leadership.
The initiative, launched a few years ago, reviews earnings per share for the majority of U.S. public companies at least once a year, looking to spot questionable reported figures. The team working on the effort, part of the SEC’s enforcement division, uses analytics and has built a database to try to pinpoint potential manipulators of EPS, the commonly used measure of a company’s financial performance.
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Apple Inc. said it plans to appeal a verdict in its high-profile antitrust case against Epic Games Inc., a contest that has brought new attention to how big technology companies manage software and applications on their platforms.
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The Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and Boston said they would cooperate with an internal central bank investigation into the trading controversy surrounding their leaders, who have both resigned.
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A federal jury in Boston found two businessmen guilty Friday in the nationwide Varsity Blues case, ruling that each conspired with a corrupt California college counselor to get his child admitted to the University of Southern California as a phony athletic recruit.
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Chinese food-delivery giant Meituan was fined more than $533 million for engaging in anticompetitive practices, the latest move by Beijing in a regulatory crackdown aimed at the country’s powerful tech companies.
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Austria’s Sebastian Kurz Steps Down as Chancellor Amid Corruption Probe
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Google’s offices in Dublin, Ireland, a low-tax country where many technology companies have established operations. PHOTO: PAUL FAITH/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
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Nearly 140 countries agreed to the most sweeping overhaul of global tax rules in a century, a move that aims to curtail tax avoidance by multinational corporations and raise additional tax revenue of as much as $150 billion annually. The accord, which is a decade in the making, now must be implemented by the signatories, a path that is likely to be far from smooth, including in a closely divided U.S. Congress.
The reform sets out a global minimum corporate tax of 15%, targeted at preventing companies from exploiting low-tax jurisdictions. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the floor set by the global minimum tax was a victory for the U.S. and its ability to raise money from companies. She urged Congress to move swiftly to enact the international tax proposals it has been debating.
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Container ships waiting to get into the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach last week. Supply-chain delays have snarled traffic between Asia and North America. PHOTO: MARK HOLTZMAN, INC./ZUMA PRESS
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Global supply-chain delays are so severe that some of the biggest U.S. retailers have resorted to an extreme—and expensive—tactic to try to stock shelves this holiday season: They are chartering their own cargo ships to import goods.
Port delays, Covid-19 outbreaks and worker shortages have snarled the flow of products between Asia and North America, threatening the supplies of everything from holiday decorations and toys to appliances and furniture. It is taking roughly 80 days to transport goods across the Pacific, or twice as long as before the pandemic, retail and shipping executives said.
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Shenzhen-based Evergrande Group is about halfway through a 30-day grace period before its bondholders can call a default because of skipped interest payments. PHOTO: GILLES SABRIE/BLOOMBERG NEWS
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Advisers to China Evergrande Group’s international bondholders have made little progress in their efforts to engage with the embattled property developer, as the clock ticks toward a likely default.
The Chinese real-estate giant skipped interest payments on $1 billion in U.S. dollar bonds on Sept. 23, and has a 30-day grace period before its bondholders can call a default. Evergrande also didn’t pay the coupon on another set of dollar bonds last week. The 25-year-old company is China’s largest issuer of junk bonds, with more than $19 billion in dollar debt outstanding.
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Educators say the viral challenges and level of anger they face over Covid-19 mandates, both spread on top tech platforms, including TikTok, have been made worse by the difficulties of another pandemic school year. PHOTO: CHRIS DELMAS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
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The nation’s largest teachers union is urging TikTok, Facebook Inc., Instagram and Twitter Inc. to take steps to halt the dissemination and spread of dangerous viral challenges and misinformation that it says pose a threat to educators and students.
In a letter sent Friday and shared with The Wall Street Journal, National Education Association President Becky Pringle asked tech leaders to make a public pledge to better regulate their platforms “to put public safety over profits.”
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