Good morning. Companies are puzzling over what to tell investors about how the still-developing global coronavirus outbreak could affect future performance. The outbreak has disrupted supply chains, closed stores and resulted in quarantines across the globe. For many companies, the outbreak has coincided with deadlines for filing annual reports due in March, and decisions about filing paperwork for initial public offerings.

Typically, the risk disclosures in these filings would contain information on factors that could materially affect their financial operations. Companies are drafting language to explain how the outbreak could affect their future operations, securities lawyers said. The challenge is providing investors with accurate information about the future when information about the outbreak is changing by the day.

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“You want to give a feel of likely outcomes, even though you can’t know exactly where this is going,” said John Bason, the finance chief at Associated British Foods PLC, the U.K.-based owner of Twinings tea and other grocery brands.

Companies could face lawsuits from investors if they aren’t sufficiently forthcoming about their financial ties to infected regions, or if they describe the virus as a hypothetical risk when it has in fact affected operations, lawyers said.

• Finance chiefs and ratings firms are ramping up their efforts to assess the impact of the outbreak on companies’ balance sheets, cash flow and liquidity buffers.
   
• Some U.S. companies say they could lose as much as half their annual revenue from China if the epidemic extends through the summer.

The U.S. Treasury Department blacklisted three Lebanese individuals and a number of Lebanon-based entities, designating them as “specially designated global terrorists” Wednesday. The U.S. alleges that they are linked to an organization that provides financial support to Iran-backed Hezbollah.

The move is part of the Trump administration’s effort to pressure Iran and its proxies battling the U.S. and its allies across several fronts in the region, including in Syria and Iraq. The Treasury said the companies and individuals are linked to the Lebanon branch of the Martyrs Foundation, which the U.S. says acts as an Iranian parastatal organization and was designated by the U.S. for supporting terrorism in 2007.

An air transport communications company has agreed to pay $7.8 million to settle allegations it did business with airlines that the U.S. had placed on a terrorist blacklist. Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques SCRL, a private Swiss company, provided commercial services and software to airlines based in Iran, Syria and Iraq that were designated terrorist organizations by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control between 2011 and 2015, the agency said.

Four traders charged with crimes related to market manipulation are trying to force the government to turn over more information about its overseas-evidence requests, after a former prosecutor alleged the Justice Department improperly used such queries.

The former precious-metals traders at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank, who are scheduled to face trial later this year, filed the motions in federal court in Chicago late Tuesday. In the filings, they referred to a memo from the ex-prosecutor who alleged his former colleagues submitted misleading applications for foreign evidence to federal judges to suspend the statute of limitations and give themselves more time to build a case, even though authorities had access to the information through other channels. The Wall Street Journal reported on the memo earlier this month.

“If these allegations are true, it would mean that, in a troubling display of hubris, the government perpetrated a fraud on this court while it purported to investigate the defendants for fraud,” attorneys for two of the ex-traders, Edward Bases and John Pacilio, wrote in their motion.

• The Trump administration has made no secret of its goal to reduce regulatory burdens on the oil industry. But internal correspondence at the offshore oil industry’s federal regulator could prove a liability, as environmental groups challenge the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement’s rationale for its decision to overhaul of a major well-drilling safety rule, legal experts say.
   
• Tax cheats, beware: The machines are watching. Governments are increasingly relying on machine learning and data analytics to analyze troves of data as they seek to detect tax evasion, respond to taxpayers’ questions and make themselves more efficient.
   
• A federal appeals court in California ruled that privately operated internet platforms are free to censor content they don’t like. Though not unexpected, the unanimous decision by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco marks the most emphatic rejection of the argument advanced in some conservative circles that YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other giant tech platforms are bound by the First Amendment.
   
• U.S. regulators rejected a plan from mining companies Peabody Energy and Arch Coal Inc. to combine their operations in a major coal-production region, saying it would limit competition and raise prices. The Federal Trade Commission voted to block Peabody and Arch’s plans to create a venture to jointly run seven coal mines in Wyoming and Colorado.
   
• Columbia Gas of Massachusetts agreed to plead guilty to a federal criminal charge and pay a $53 million fine after deadly gas explosions and fires rocked three communities north of Boston in 2018, federal officials said Wednesday. NiSource, the parent company, has also agreed to sell its operations in Massachusetts as a result of the disaster in which an 18-year-old man died and nearly 25 others were injured.
   
• Governments are increasingly relying on machine learning and data analytics to analyze troves of data as they seek to detect tax evasion, respond to taxpayers’ questions and make themselves more efficient. In Brazil, the customs agency’s system for detecting anomalies now prompts more than 30% of inspections. Canada next month will launch an automated system that will respond to inquiries about tax filing. The Internal Revenue Service is designing machine-built graphs to plot the relationships among participants in business deals, giving auditors a new tool to analyze transactions and detect tax avoidance.

Rajeev Misra’s rise to the top of SoftBank Group’s $100 billion Vision Fund isn’t a traditional tale of corporate ladder-climbing. He succeeded, in part, by striking at two of his main rivals inside SoftBank with a dark-arts campaign of personal sabotage.

The tactics included planting negative news stories about them, concocting a shareholder campaign to pressure SoftBank to fire them and even attempting to lure one of them into a “honey trap” of sexual blackmail, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

At stake for Mr. Misra was the opportunity to be the right hand of Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s founder. He would help Mr. Son spread billions across the tech world, funding highflying startups such as Uber Technologies—and, recently, stumbling with a big stake in WeWork. The fund would expand SoftBank’s already huge footprint, which included a telecom empire, a microchip designer and robot makers.

• Bayer said it would strengthen external oversight of its due diligence in deal making in its latest concession to shareholders after its 2018 acquisition of Monsanto swamped it with a tide of lawsuits and sent its stock crashing.
   
• They may share the same first name, but there are few other similarities between Disney Chairman Bob Iger and his successor as chief executive, Bob Chapek. While Mr. Iger is known for being charismatic and cosmopolitan and loves to hobnob, Mr. Chapek is all business with little time or interest in niceties, people who have worked closely with both say.

Two of the world’s largest investment funds have begun selling down stakes in coal miners citing environmental concerns, leaving shares of some of the companies concentrated in the hands of a few large U.S. investors.

As big fund managers amend what they call their ethical investment policies, analysts say more selling could follow.

In recent weeks, Norway’s trillion-dollar sovereign-wealth fund, Norges Bank, and French giant BNP Paribas Asset Management have sold shares in companies that mine thermal coal, including Anglo American PLC. A few large funds, including Vanguard Group and Dimensional Fund Managers, now have outsize holdings in many smaller coal-mining companies.

Thousands of Amazon sellers who built their businesses using China’s cheap and efficient manufacturers are on the spot as the coronavirus shuts factories there.

Sellers say Amazon’s ranking algorithm demotes products that are out of stock. To avoid that painful fate, many are raising prices to slow sales, and attempting to shift production to other countries.

Larger corporations like Apple also face difficulties in getting goods made on time in China. But merchants say that as small buyers they will be low on the list for merchandise when production eventually revives. And once stock is replenished, they say they will need to spend big on advertising to regain their Amazon rankings, which make products appear higher in site searches.

• China Tightens Traveler Screening, Fearing Reinfection From Abroad
• As China’s Economy Suffers, Xi Faces Pressure to Lift Virus Restrictions

• As coronavirus continues its spread outside of China, the global airline industry is recalibrating its response to a threat that could be its worst since the financial crisis a decade ago. Deutsche Lufthansa, Germany’s flagship airline, said Wednesday it would start slashing costs in anticipation of a coming hit to revenues and profits from canceled flights to China, where the virus first emerged.
   
• Companies are canceling business travel and corporate off-site events around the globe and making contingency plans for more employees to work remotely as fears rise over Covid-19’s spread. Nestlé told more than 290,000 employees to suspend all international business travel until March 15, and requested that all domestic trips be skipped whenever possible for now.
   
• The coronavirus outbreak has already forced Hollywood studios to postpone several prominent films’ release in China. Now the epidemic is starting to disrupt production of the next slate of blockbusters.
   
• Rio Tinto warned the coronavirus epidemic is threatening its supply chain as it reported a 41% decline in annual net profit, but said it would pay a record final dividend. The world’s second-biggest miner by market value on Wednesday said its products were continuing to reach customers, but it was seeking ways to adjust to the impact of the virus on demand for commodities globally.
   
• Microsoft warned that its personal-computing business is likely to miss its revenue targets for the company’s current quarter because suppliers are gearing up operations at a slower pace than the technology giant anticipated as China grapples with the coronavirus. 
   
• Marriott International said it expects the epidemic to weigh on its fee revenue in 2020, as the pathogen’s spread outside of China stokes fears and disrupts travel.
   
• Coronavirus Cruise Captain and Crew on the Lockdown: ‘The Rulebook Was Thrown Out’
• The German Economy Was Faltering, Then Came the Coronavirus

Papa John’s International expects to return to sales growth this year, after turning off some customers in recent years.

The pizza chain on Wednesday said it expects comparable sales, or those at restaurants open at least a year, would rise between 2.5% and 5% this year in the U.S. and Canada. That would mark a reversal from flat sales in 2019 and a drop in 2018, after controversial statements by founder and former chief executive John Schnatter alienated some customers.

Papa John’s lost customers in 2017 after Mr. Schnatter attributed the company’s slowing sales to the way the National Football League was handling players’ protests during the national anthem. In December of that year, he agreed to step down as CEO amid a backlash.

Blackstone Group agreed Wednesday to acquire IQ Student Accommodation from a group led by Goldman Sachs for £4.66 billion ($6.06 billion) including debt, the latest bet by the U.S. buyout giant on the growth of student housing in the U.K.

More generally, the deal is an endorsement of Britain’s economy as its government faces the challenge of reaching a new trade deal with the European Union by the end of the year following the U.K.’s split from the bloc last month. It is also an early but significant sign of a rebound in European deal-making this year despite a global slowdown.

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