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The Morning Risk Report: Airbus Settlement Signals More Collaboration on International Bribery Cases
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A 2016 law gave French prosecutors authority to strike deals with companies such as plane maker Airbus without an admission of liability. REUTERS/Regis Duvignau/File Photo
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Good morning. A recent overhaul of anticorruption laws in France helped set the stage for Airbus to reach a €3.6 billion ($4 billion) settlement with prosecutors in three countries on the same day—a deal that illustrates the potential upside for companies of increasing collaboration between prosecutors, Risk & Compliance Journal’s Dylan Tokar and Kristin Broughton report.
The coordinated resolution of the four-year-long investigations into the European plane maker represents a milestone for France, which previously had been criticized for failing to hold companies accountable for foreign bribery.
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France will take the greatest share—€2.08 billion—of the penalties paid by Airbus to resolve charges that it paid bribes through intermediaries to win business, under an agreement unveiled in separate court hearings Friday with French, U.S. and U.K. prosecutors. In each country, the Toulouse, France-based company entered into what is known in the U.S. as a deferred prosecution agreement, a type of settlement that allows companies to resolve allegations of wrongdoing without being formally charged.
The deal signals a new level of collaboration between law-enforcement agencies in countries that previously may have viewed each other more as competitors than partners. Close coordination among prosecutors was a boon to Airbus, allowing it to efficiently resolve its legal cases in several countries, according to a lawyer for the company.
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BMO Sets Climate Change as Top Engagement Priority
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BMO Global Asset Management, a unit of the Bank of Montreal, said Monday that climate change would be its top priority when it engages with companies it invests in.
The Canadian asset manager, which manages 852 billion Canadian dollars ($643.6 billion) as of the end of October, said it would focus on phasing out coal, climate risk at financial institutions, marine transport and sustainable food systems and will continue to work with Climate Action 100+, the largest group of investors by assets pressuring companies to act on climate change, to engage with high-emitting companies.
“For BMO GAM this means using our influence to engage with investee companies, offering opportunities for our clients to invest in solutions and encouraging strong action by policy makers,” said Vicki Bakhshi, director of the responsible investment team at BMO, in prepared remarks.
—Dieter Holger
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Ford’s plant in Chicago where the Ford Explorer and Lincoln Aviator sport-utility vehicles are assembled. PHOTO: JOSE M. OSORIO/CHICAGO TRIBUNE/ZUMA PRESS
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The Trump administration in the coming weeks is expected to finalize new fuel-economy rules that dial back the targets adopted under President Obama. Mr. Trump’s legal fight with California, the state that is the U.S. auto industry’s biggest market, is expected to be bitter and drawn-out.
It is part of corporate America’s struggle, three years in, to find a way to operate with the Trump White House—where a disagreement could launch a barrage of negative tweets and when dramatic policy shifts come without warning. In the auto industry, none of the major players have managed to forge a way forward.
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Trump administration officials are granting fewer exemptions to tariffs on Chinese imports, with the approval rate recently plunging to 3% in the third round of levies from 35% in the first two, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Requests for exemptions have been made by more than 4,500 companies, which typically say they have no viable or cost-effective alternatives to Chinese products. Many companies seek more than one exemption. For just the fourth round alone, more than 8,700 requests for exemptions were made by Friday, the filing deadline.
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The Federal Trade Commission on Monday sued to block a $1.37 billion deal in which the maker of Schick razors sought to buy upstart rival Harry’s. The FTC alleged that Edgewell Personal Care Co.’s planned acquisition of Harry’s would eliminate one of the most important competitive forces in a shaving industry that has long been controlled by two entrenched companies.
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Peloton Interactive, the maker of popular at-home fitness bikes, said Tuesday it has settled legal disputes with Flywheel Sports over alleged technology theft and patents considered important to success in the growing boutique fitness industry.
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U.S. aviation regulators plan to craft new safety standards for specific unmanned-aircraft models, the biggest step yet toward eventually authorizing widespread delivery of packages by drones.
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A federal regulator has hired an adviser to help recapitalize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage-finance giants at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis. The Federal Housing Finance Agency said Monday it tapped investment bank Houlihan Lokey as a first step in returning the mortgage companies to private ownership after their $190 billion government bailout.
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Citigroup suspended a junk-bond trader in London for repeatedly failing to pay for food taken from the bank’s cafeteria. Paras Shah, the head of Citigroup’s high-yield bond trading for Europe, the Middle East and Africa was suspended last month, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Shah earned about £1 million ($1.32 million) annually including a bonus. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson reiterated Monday that trade talks with the EU wouldn’t be extended past the end of 2020. PHOTO: JASON ALDEN/BLOOMBERG NEWS
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Days after the U.K. left the European Union, both sides set the stage for what are likely to be difficult negotiations over their future relations.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the U.K. would accept a total break with the bloc—which would involve tariffs on EU-U.K. trade for the first time in almost half a century—if a trade deal can’t be reached by the end of the year. An hour earlier, the bloc’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, said the EU would seek a “highly ambitious” trade deal with the U.K., but that would depend on British guarantees to ensure fair competition.
The speeches suggest that the two sides will clash over what the EU calls the level playing field: standards that underlie the economy relating to issues like social, labor, environmental and government aid for companies.
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Smoke contamination is a growing threat to the $336 billion global wine industry as uncontrolled fires break out with more severity in Australia, California and other grape-growing regions. Unlike some other fruits, grapes absorb smoke and those ashy flavors can end up in the wine, making it unpalatable.
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A woman wears a protective mask as she waits on an empty subway platform during the evening rush hour Monday in Beijing. PHOTO: KEVIN FRAYER/GETTY IMAGES
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Travel restrictions related to the coronavirus outbreak could limit the work of external auditors, possibly leading to incomplete reports, late corporate filings or last-minute scrambles for deadline extensions, securities lawyers and former regulators say.
Governments around the world have imposed entry restrictions on visitors from China, while major airlines canceled flights to China. The Big Four accounting firms, which conduct audits for many of the biggest U.S. public companies, have also imposed travel restrictions on employees.
PricewaterhouseCoopers has said it would cancel employee and partner travel to mainland China and surrounding regions. Ernst & Young has said employees should stay home for several weeks after traveling to China. KPMG’s U.S. division prohibited all business travel to mainland China. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu urged employees to indefinitely defer nonessential travel to China, a spokeswoman said.
The restrictions raise a question for U.S. companies preparing regulatory filings that depend on independent audits of operations in affected areas: What happens when auditors can’t travel?
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Warren Buffett, 89, has guided the conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway since 1970. PHOTO: SCOTT MORGAN/REUTERS
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Few executives manage to stay in power for decades, although the tenure of S&P 500 chief executive officers has gradually risen since the financial crisis, and the founders of some of the hottest tech companies have established voting control that could help them remain at the helm indefinitely.
Some corporate boards are increasingly seeing merit in longer CEO tenures, said James Citrin, head of the North American CEO practice for Spencer Stuart, a leadership advisory and executive recruiting firm. “The mind-set about CEO tenure is at the beginning of a potential change,” he said.
New research from Spencer Stuart suggests that when top executives stay for more than a decade, they often deliver some of their best years of performance.
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Former Aetna Chief Executive Mark Bertolini said he is being pushed off the board of CVS Health. Mr. Bertolini, who joined the CVS board after the November 2018 closing of CVS’s nearly $70 billion deal to buy Aetna, told The Wall Street Journal he was willing to stay on the board, and he said the integration between the two companies isn’t complete. CVS said Monday it was reducing the number of board members following corporate governance best practices
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Tribune Publishing said it has named Finance Chief Terry Jimenez as its chief executive, succeeding Timothy P. Knight, who has stepped down from the board and will leave the company at the end of the month after a year in the top job. The move comes after hedge fund Alden Global Capital LLC in November became the largest shareholder of the newspaper publisher.
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Facebook appointed Dropbox Chief Executive Drew Houston to its board of directors. Mr. Houston, a friend of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who has credited him with providing valuable advice on running Dropbox and has appeared with him at social events, joins the board as an independent director.
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Activist investor Starboard Value is taking a swipe at Green Dot Corp., a financial firm known for issuing prepaid debit cards.
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The materials detailed the CIA’s cyberespionage arsenal. PHOTO: SAUL LOEB/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
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Manhattan federal prosecutors are poised to open their case Tuesday against a former software engineer for the Central Intelligence Agency who is charged with handing over a trove of classified information on the spy agency’s hacking operations to WikiLeaks.
In 2017, WikiLeaks released more than 8,000 pages of secret materials—which the antisecrecy organization called “Vault 7”—detailing the CIA’s cyberespionage arsenal, including the agency’s playbook for hacking smartphones, computer operating systems, messaging applications and internet-connected televisions. It was one of the largest breaches in the agency’s history.
Federal prosecutors say the defendant, Joshua Schulte, stole the documents when he worked in a CIA unit that designed the hacking tools. He faces 11 criminal counts, including illegal gathering and transmission of national defense information—charges that derive from the Espionage Act, a statute that has been applied in other WikiLeaks cases. Mr. Schulte and his lawyers have called the espionage charges vague and overreaching, saying they infringed on constitutional free-speech rights.
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