Good morning. A bank regulator on Thursday issued a strong rebuke of Wells Fargo, saying that the bank had weak risk controls, which contributed to its fake-accounts scandal.

Wells Fargo’s former audit and risk chiefs, as well as a risk officer in the bank’s retail division, were among the executives punished by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for their roles in the sales scandal. The OCC also banned former Chief Executive John Stumpf and fined him $17.5 million.

The bank regulator said “failures in the checks and balances” was one of the factors responsible for an aggressive sales culture at Wells Fargo that led employees to open millions of possibly fake accounts. The scandal has damaged left the bank’s once-sterling reputation.

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The action by the OCC should serve as a warning to compliance and risk executives across the banking industry, according to Cliff Rossi, a former risk officer at Citigroup. That’s because even though Wells Fargo had in place what’s known as “the three lines of defense”—a governance framework that includes checks on front-line businesses by risk and audit departments—the defenses still broke down.

“They had all of the governance and the infrastructure,” said Mr. Rossi, now a professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. “Clearly none of the infrastructure worked.”

The U.S. Treasury Department blacklisted four foreign companies for allegedly supporting and facilitating Iran’s petrochemical and petroleum exports, among the latest efforts by Washington to ramp up pressure on Tehran, Risk & Compliance Journal’s Mengqi Sun reports.

The Treasury alleged the four companies, based in areas ranging from Hong Kong to Shanghai to Dubai, collectively ordered the transfer of the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars to the state-owned National Iranian Oil Co. as payment for Iranian exports.

• Europe to Avoid Triggering Sanctions if Iran Limits Nuclear Expansion

A Miami-based businessman pleaded guilty to conspiring to pay $4.4 million in bribes to officials at a state-controlled oil company in Ecuador, Risk & Compliance Journal’s Dylan Tokar reports.

Armengol Alfonso Cevallos Diaz pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, the U.S. Justice Department said.

Three former Russian bank owners were ordered by a London court to pay $900 million for siphoning money out and contributing to the collapse of domestic lender National Bank Trust five years ago.

NBT, now under the control of Russia’s central bank, sued the three men in London in 2016, highlighting the widespread use of England’s commercial courts to resolve Russian business disputes because of the courts’ perceived integrity. NBT had 1.5 million depositors and 400 branches at the time of its collapse in December 2014.

• Travelers said it faced higher-than-expected claims payments for lawsuits and jury awards. The insurance industry in recent months has become increasingly concerned about “social inflation.” The term encompasses a greater willingness to sue insurers and a higher expectation among juries of what insurance companies should pay to injured parties, according to industry executives.
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• A Portuguese banker was found dead after being identified as a suspect in a fraud case against Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s former president. 
   
• John N. Kapoor, a former billionaire who founded opioid maker Insys Therapeutics Inc., was sentenced to 5½ years in prison for his role in a racketeering conspiracy to illegally boost sales of his company’s prescription fentanyl drug. The sentencing caps the fall of a former pharmaceutical industry highflier, along with the company he founded and several fellow executives.
   
• The Trump administration is moving to curb the sale of imported counterfeit goods over the internet, warning electronic commerce platforms and warehouse operators of greater scrutiny and penalties if they don’t help ferret out fakes. 
   
• Mammoth Energy Services Inc., which rebuilt much of Puerto Rico’s power grid after Hurricane Maria, is facing a lawsuit alleging the company paid bribes to cheat a competing contractor out of $500 million in government business.
   
• EPA Releases New Clean-Water Rules Scaling Back Federal Oversight

The tally of deaths and infections from the spread of China’s new coronavirus continued to mount, further stretching hospital resources, leading to canceled events and more locked-down cities near the center of the outbreak.

China’s National Health Commission confirmed 830 cases of infection on Friday morning, logging more than 250 new cases since an official count was released a day earlier. And the official death count rose to 26, according to the commission and state media.

Singapore said it had two new confirmed coronavirus cases, bringing the total number there to three. All are residents of Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the outbreak originated; they were on visits to Singapore over the weeklong Lunar New Year holiday. Overall, Singaporean authorities have identified 28 suspected cases of the coronavirus; all but two of them had recently traveled to China.

• Drugmakers Rush to Develop Vaccines Against China Virus
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The Vatican said it has regained active membership in an international financial-watchdog network that recently suspended it over what the network called security concerns.

Readmission to the Egmont Group, a Toronto-based network of more than 160 national financial-intelligence units around the world, is a boost to the Vatican’s financial credibility, which has suffered several blows in recent months.

Egmont suspended the Vatican financial watchdog’s access in November, saying its handling of confidential information posed “an evident security threat to our organization.

• Nearly a dozen technology companies said they will provide free or reduced-cost cybersecurity services to presidential campaigns, which experts and intelligence officials have warned are ripe targets for intrusion and disinformation. 

U.S. airlines that operate the Boeing 737 MAX are facing the prospect that the aircraft’s prolonged grounding could stymie their growth and benefit competitors well into this year.

The MAX has been grounded world-wide since last March following a pair of plane crashes within five months that killed 346 people. The situation has been costly and at times chaotic for airlines that have had to deal with months of uncertainty about when they will be allowed to fly the jets and when they can expect the dozens of planes they had on order.

• The price of rhodium, a precious metal that strips pollutants out of exhaust fumes, is surging as car manufacturers in Asia and Europe scramble to abide by stricter emission regimes. Supplies of rhodium are limited because the metal is mined as a byproduct of platinum, palladium and gold, while demand is rising as regulators restrict emissions and subject autos to more rigorous tests.
   
• Union-Pacific Says It Will Need 3,000 Fewer Workers in 2020
• Greeting Cards Retailer Papyrus Files for Bankruptcy

The International Accounting Standards Board, a London-based standard setter, issued amendments to IAS 1 to clarify how companies classify debt and other liabilities as current or noncurrent.

The amendments modify existing requirements that help companies determine whether debt and other liabilities with an uncertain settlement date should be classified as current or noncurrent.

The amendments aren’t expected to significantly affect companies’ financial statements, the IASB said in a statement. But they could result in some companies reclassifying some liabilities from current to noncurrent, and vice versa, which could impact loan covenants.

The changes take effect in January 2022, but early application is permitted, according to the IASB.

—Nina Trentmann

• JPMorgan Chase paid its chief executive, James Dimon, $31.5 million for his work in 2019, a 1.6% boost, as the bank set fresh records in profit and stock price. The pay includes $6.5 million in cash, including salary and bonus, and $25 million in stock grants that would be earned over the coming years, depending on the bank’s performance.
   
• Xerox Holdings said it plans to nominate 11 independent candidates to replace HP’s board at the computer and printer maker’s annual shareholder meeting this summer. The move, which confirmed an earlier report by The Wall Street Journal, comes as Xerox pushes a $33 billion unsolicited takeover bid for HP.

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