Good morning. Prosecutors in Germany opened a criminal probe into the role of German safety inspector TÜV SÜD in the January collapse of a mine-waste dam owned by Vale SA in Brazil that killed 270 people.

A spokeswoman for the Munich prosecutor’s office described the investigation as preliminary, but declined to further comment on its scope. In Germany, a preliminary investigation is a prerequisite for criminal charges being filed. Such probes can also end without charges if the prosecutors decide there isn’t sufficient evidence to bring a case to court.

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It is the first investigation of TÜV SÜD in Germany following the deadly dam collapse. TÜV SÜD, a privately held company, carries out certification and safety auditing work across a range of industries, including telecommunications, railways and health care.

Until now, only Brazilian authorities were known to be probing TÜV SÜD’s role. In September, Brazilian police accused six employees from the auditing firm of covering up structural dangers at the dam during safety audits. Prosecutors in Brazil are also probing the company’s role.

• Experts Blame Deadly Vale Dam Collapse on Drainage Problems

The Federal Reserve on Thursday lifted consent orders against JPMorgan Chase and U.S. Bancorp stemming from what the central bank identified as weak anti-money-laundering controls, the Risk & Compliance Journal’s Kristin Broughton reports. 

The Fed’s order against JPMorgan, issued in January 2013, directed the bank to strengthen its board oversight of anti-money-laundering compliance and to improve its management of compliance-related risks.

The central bank’s order against U.S. Bancorp, issued last February, directed the Minneapolis-based bank to improve its customer due diligence procedures and strengthen its board oversight of anti-money-laundering controls.

PayPal Holdings sued a federal banking regulator Wednesday, alleging its new rule has hampered the company’s ability to offer credit products and has created confusion among users of its popular digital-payment services PayPal and Venmo.

The lawsuit challenges the regulation on prepaid accounts rolled out by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in April. Although the rule’s primary aim is to improve consumer protection for prepaid payment cards, it also extends to “digital wallets,” or any financial products capable of holding cash balances directly on cards or electronic devices.

• Federal regulators proposed an overhaul of rules governing how banks lend hundreds of billions of dollars in low-income neighborhoods, setting up a potential break with the Federal Reserve. The overhaul is a priority for Comptroller of the Currency Joseph Otting, who says it will boost lending under the Community Reinvestment Act and make existing requirements more transparent and consistent. The act requires banks to serve borrowers of all income levels in their communities.
   
• The federal government charged 10 former National Football League players on Thursday with participating in a scheme that stole $3.4 million from an NFL health-care fund for retired players.
   
• The Pentagon’s internal watchdog said Thursday it would review a recent decision to award a $400 million contract for border-wall construction to a North Dakota-based company President Trump has publicly supported.

Federal officials are considering seeking a preliminary injunction against Facebook over antitrust concerns related to how its products interact, according to people familiar with the matter.

If it materializes, the action by the Federal Trade Commission would focus on Facebook’s policies concerning it how it integrates its apps or enables them to work with potential rivals, these people said. Alongside its core social network, Facebook’s key products also include Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.

The potential FTC action likely would seek to block Facebook from enforcing those policies on grounds they are anticompetitive, the people said. An injunction could seek to bar Facebook from further integrating apps that federal regulators might look to unwind as part of a potential future breakup of the company, one of the people said.

• Facebook Won’t Change Web Tracking in Response to California Privacy Law

• The creator of “Fortnite” is challenging Alphabet's Google’s policy of taking a cut of payments made for app-related purchases at a time when regulators have started scrutinizing those kind of arrangements between tech companies and their vendors.

The global grounding of Boeing's 737 MAX is set to stretch to nearly a year as regulators expressed concern the U.S. plane maker set unrealistic expectations for the jetliner’s return to passenger service.

The Federal Aviation Administration is expected to approve fixes to a MAX flight-control system and related pilot training in February, about two months beyond what Boeing recently envisioned, according to people familiar with the matter. That means the troubled airliner might not carry passengers in the U.S. until much later in the spring.

• China’s aviation regulator has raised concerns with Boeing about the reliability and security of the plane maker’s proposed changes to the 737 MAX jet’s software and flight control systems to put the plane back in service.
   
• Southwest Airlines and Boeing said they struck a deal to compensate the airline for some of the damage from the grounding of the MAX. The carrier said Thursday it would share $125 million of the proceeds with its employees. Southwest didn’t disclose the full terms of its agreement with Boeing, which it said covered a portion of its projected financial damages. It said it is continuing to negotiate with the aerospace giant.

Japanese artists hired to promote Walt Disney’s movie “Frozen 2” on Twitter said they were instructed to hide that they were paid for the work, contradicting Disney’s initial explanation that the omission was accidental.

“The agency that hired us for this campaign requested that we not label our work as a promotion,” said an artist who publishes under the name Kosame Daizu in a tweet.

Disney initially said it had intended to ask the artists to show that the tweets were part of an official advertising campaign, and it called the absence of disclosure a lapse.

• Reforms such as Sarbanes-Oxley have improved corporate governance by preventing chief executive officers from stacking boards with their friends and allies. But a more subtle bias still plagues many boardrooms—one that policy changes and legislation can’t combat.
   
• It’s no secret big data and artificial intelligence are starting to roil a bunch of professions. Yet there’s another job that is also being altered with extraordinary speed—only this one is getting reshaped not so much by high tech but, rather, by high ideals: chief executive officer. A loud and swelling chorus is calling for CEOs to meet the interests of all their stakeholders, including customers, employees, shareholders, the communities in which they operate and society as a whole.
   
• Oracle said it won’t replace its late co-CEO, Mark Hurd, leaving Safra Catz as the sole top executive leading the software giant after years of operating with an unusual, two-chief structure.
   
• Luxury-brands company Tapestry said the head of its Kate Spade brand, Anna Bakst, is leaving at the end of 2019, marking a less than two-year tenure as leader of the struggling brand.

China indicated that a near-term trade agreement with the U.S. has yet to be completed despite President Trump’s signoff, highlighting the unpredictability of a negotiation process that has rattled global markets and businesses.

Mr. Trump on Thursday approved a so-called phase-one trade pact that will scale back existing tariffs on Chinese imports and eliminate new levies scheduled to take effect on Sunday, in exchange for a written pledge from Beijing to buy tens of billions of dollars worth of U.S. farm products, among other concessions.

• The National Labor Relations Board instructed a federal judge to approve a settlement in a case pertaining to McDonald’s Corp.’s status as a joint employer, helping shield the company from liability from the employment practices of its hundreds of U.S. franchisees. If finalized, the determination would put more responsibility on franchisees for McDonald’s and other companies to address the concerns of their workers.
   
• Today’s full-employment economy may be a bonanza for a company’s sales figures, but it has a huge corporate downside: It’s hard to keep the best-performing employees from jumping ship. The best managers are getting creative—not by offering higher pay pre-emptively, but by thinking more about what would make someone sad to leave, and about whether they are giving employees enough of those things. 
   
• Crude oil exporters and customers should get used to high shipping costs. Freight rates for the world’s biggest tankers shot up in September on a series of geopolitical events and are still hovering near the highest levels in a decade even after ticking down in the fall. Tighter capacity in shipping markets and longer sailings as fuel-buying countries look to more far-flung markets for crude will likely keep freight rates high well into 2020, according to the chiefs of two of the world’s biggest tanker companies.

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