Three media companies tied to exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui have agreed to pay $539 million to settle regulatory claims they violated investor-protection laws when they raised money from over 5,000 investors.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said the agreement resolves an investigation it began last year into whether the sale of stock and digital assets complied with rules meant to protect small investors. The companies said the money they raised would be spent to build a news and social-media platform that would be “the only uncensored and independent bridge between China and the Western world,” according to the fundraising documents.

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The three businesses—GTV Media Group Inc., Saraca Media Group Inc. and Voice of Guo Media Inc.—settled the SEC’s probe without admitting or denying wrongdoing. The total monetary sanctions include over $480 million that must be repaid to investors and $35 million in fines, the SEC said.

The total fines ordered in the case constitute one of the SEC’s largest enforcement cases of its fiscal year, which runs through the end of September. The deal calls for the companies to post a notice of the regulatory case on their websites and to repay proceeds of their fundraising within two weeks. The SEC often sets up what it calls a “fair fund,” whose administrator distributes money back to harmed investors.

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Senior Senate Republicans on Monday threatened to indefinitely hold up the nominations of five top Treasury Department officials if the Biden administration doesn’t blacklist the firm managing Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline project.

The Biden administration has implemented sanctions against several firms that have provided support to the project but not against Nord Stream 2 AG, saying that it would irritate relations with critical ally Germany and do little to stop the project, given that it was near completion.

Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled gas-export monopoly and the pipeline owner, said last week that construction on the pipeline had been completed. But there are still bureaucratic hurdles that have to be overcome to get it running. Republicans say they are concerned the pipeline project bolsters Europe’s reliance on Russian energy and gives Moscow leverage over Washington’s trans-Atlantic allies. 

Companies such as Tencent Holdings Ltd., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., ByteDance Ltd. and Baidu Inc. were among those called to a meeting last Thursday with Chinese officials to discuss the issue, people familiar with the matter said.

• The main trade association for real-estate agents on Monday sought to block a broad Justice Department investigation of industry practices, after an antitrust settlement between the two sides fell apart this summer.
   
• The White House said Monday it intends to nominate Alvaro Bedoya, an academic who has criticized facial-recognition and other digital technologies that can be used for surveillance, to a seat on the Federal Trade Commission. It also plans to nominate Rostin Behnam as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates markets for hundreds of trillions of dollars of derivatives. 
   
• The District of Columbia’s attorney general accused Amazon.com Inc. of contracting with wholesalers in a way that drives up product prices on other websites and insulates the e-retail giant from competition, adding new allegations to a pending district antitrust lawsuit. Amazon says its policies encourage lower prices for its shoppers, and are legal. It has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
   
• Blackstone Inc. abandoned a $3.3 billion takeover of Chinese commercial-property developer Soho China Ltd. in the face of an unexpectedly long regulatory review.
   
• Iran said Monday it planned to resume nuclear talks in the near future, the clearest indication yet that negotiations on reviving the 2015 nuclear deal could soon resume, and the Biden administration confirmed it would drop a resolution censuring Iran for failing to cooperate with nuclear inspectors.
   
• Private-equity firm GPB Capital Holdings LLC, currently facing fraud allegations from the Securities and Exchange Commission and more than a half-dozen states, is selling its Prime Automotive Group of car dealerships for about $880 million.

Natural gas and electricity markets were already surging in Europe when a fresh catalyst emerged: The wind in the stormy North Sea stopped blowing.

The sudden slowdown in wind-driven electricity production off the coast of the U.K. in recent weeks whipsawed through regional energy markets. Gas and coal-fired electricity plants were called in to make up the shortfall from wind.

Natural-gas prices, already boosted by the pandemic recovery and a lack of fuel in storage caverns and tanks, hit all-time highs. Thermal coal, long shunned for its carbon emissions, has emerged from a long price slump as utilities are forced to turn on backup power sources.

• Inside Shell’s Push to Restart Oil Platforms After Hurricane Ida
• Global Oil Demand to Exceed Pre-Pandemic Levels Next Year, OPEC Says

• Americans’ expectations of future inflation hit a record high last month, according to a new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, potentially challenging the central bank’s confidence that inflation pressures will ebb over time.
   
• House Democrats spelled out their proposed tax increases on Monday, pushing higher rates on corporations, investors and high-income business owners as they try to piece together enough votes for legislation to expand the social safety net and combat climate change.
   
• From Portugal to Singapore and across most of the Americas, birthrates are falling, and population growth in the industrialized world has stalled or reversed. That prospect brings with it the specter of a shrinking labor force, an aging population and stagnant economic growth.

A surge in Covid-19 deaths caused by the highly contagious Delta variant is hitting working-age people hard while highlighting the risks for people who remain unvaccinated.

Federal data show Covid-19 deaths among people under 55 have roughly matched highs near 1,800 a week set during last winter’s surge. These data show weekly tallies for overall Covid-19 deaths, meanwhile, remain well under half of the pandemic peak near 26,000 reached in January.

An Israeli cybersecurity firm has been exploiting a significant Apple Inc. software vulnerability since February to silently infect iPhones using iMessage, the company’s messaging software, according to the research group that discovered the issue.

On Monday, Apple supplied a critical security update fixing the flaw, but the vulnerability had been used in attacks by Israel’s NSO Group, according to Citizen Lab. Citizen Lab is an academic research group that investigates cyberattacks on journalists and dissidents.

An Apple spokesman declined to say whether users were protected from the attack described by Citizen Lab. In a note on its website, Apple said it had addressed a problem reported to it by Citizen Lab and that it was “aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited.”

• The European Union’s recent $270 million fine against WhatsApp was held up for months by disagreements among national authorities, ratcheting up tensions over how to enforce the bloc’s privacy rules.
   
• The Biden administration is pushing federal agencies to adopt a cybersecurity philosophy that has become increasingly popular in the private sector amid a growing shift toward cloud computing and a surge in cyberattacks: trust nothing.
   
• A news release touting a partnership between cryptocurrency litecoin and giant retailer Walmart Inc. turned out to be fake.

Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said Facebook Inc. allows its more than three billion users to speak on equal footing with the elites of politics, culture and journalism, and that its standards of behavior apply to everyone, no matter their status or fame.

In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, according to company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The program, known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the company’s normal enforcement process, the documents show. Some users are “whitelisted”—rendered immune from enforcement actions—while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.

Large U.S. banks typically choose a company veteran when they hire a chief financial officer, a pattern highlighted Friday when Bank of America Corp. named a new CFO.

The pick, Alastair Borthwick, previously led BofA’s global commercial banking unit and before that was co-head of its global capital markets division. Mr. Borthwick, who joined the Charlotte, N.C.-based company in 2005, is set to succeed departing finance chief Paul Donofrio. Mr. Donofrio, who joined BofA in 1999 and was CFO for six years, will focus on sustainable finance.

Complex balance sheets, tight regulatory oversight and the global nature of their business lead banks to build deep benches of finance talent to be able to fill positions internally, recruiters and analysts said.

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