Good morning. The European Union wants to boost the continent’s power to fight money laundering following a series of scandals that have made Europe a center of financial crime. 

A proposal laid out by Valdis Dombrovskis, vice president of the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, calls for a new supervisory body or new powers for the European Banking Authority, one of the bloc’s existing banking regulators. Member states had already given the EBA some autonomy to deal with the issue, but the commission said it wasn’t enough.
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Each country in the EU has its own regulator responsible for monitoring money laundering. In many cases that have come to light in recent years, these agencies failed to communicate with one another, making it difficult to track suspicious money flows across borders. The commission also wants to harmonize EU rules to tackle money laundering and terrorist financing. Currently, each country is responsible for applying the rules, and differing interpretations lead to loopholes in the system.

The lack of proper tools and oversight to prevent or catch money laundering has become an embarrassment to European authorities and countries, some of them previously considered squeaky clean. In 2018, one of Denmark’s largest banks, Danske Bank A/S, disclosed that its tiny Estonian branch had moved more than $230 billion from Russia and other former Soviet states into Europe for years, undetected.

Oppenheimer & Co. is applying business continuity lessons learned during superstorm Sandy as it manages lockdowns intended to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.

“Based on that experience, the firm was able to, through a lot of the hard work of its IT and operations teams, stay up and running,” said Douglas Siegel, the broker-dealer’s chief compliance officer. 

In an interview with Risk & Compliance Journal’s Mengqi Sun, Mr. Siegel described his day-to-day as he manages the compliance department through teleconferencing and online databases and what the office might look like when people return.

• World Acceptance Corp. will likely spend $21.7 million to resolve a bribery probe by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the compay said. A consumer lender based in Greenville, S.C., World Acceptance said in announcing its fourth-quarter results that the sum represented the estimated cost of resolving an SEC investigation into the company’s compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Federal officials withdrew approval for more than 60 manufacturers in China to export N95-style masks to the U.S. after finding what they said were a large number of low-quality products from those companies.

The shift illustrates the challenge to federal officials who are trying to help meet huge demand for masks from front-line workers battling the coronavirus pandemic, while also ensuring that medical gear works effectively.

• Unproven Coronavirus Cures Flood U.S. Regulators

• Turkey blocked units of Citigroup Inc., BNP Paribas SA and UBS Group AG from trading its currency in an effort to stymie investors who are betting that the country’s weak financial standing will continue to deteriorate. Turkey’s banking regulator said the lenders failed to fulfill their liabilities in Turkish lira transactions with Turkish banks.
   
• Brazilian mining company Vale SA is turning to a U.S. court to obtain information related to its allegations that an Israeli diamond trader made undisclosed investments in New York City real estate. Vale last year won a $2 billion arbitration award against a company tied to diamond trader Beny Steinmetz. The miner, which has been trying to collect the money, has been trying to track Mr. Steinmetz’s holdings around the world. 
   
• UnitedHealth Group Inc. will offer customers about $1.5 billion of discounts and other help, including credits toward premiums and suspension of out-of-pocket charges for some doctor visits, amid the coronavirus pandemic. A small portion of the payments represents an advance against rebates that will likely be required under the Affordable Care Act, the company said. 

President Trump’s coronavirus task force put the brakes on a proposal from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that sought to provide detailed guidelines for schools, churches and businesses to reopen, asking the agency for revisions that would ultimately make the guidelines less prescriptive, White House officials said.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, meanwhile, said this week that the state would use a dashboard of seven metrics. The key to the equation is the number of people hospitalized for Covid-19.

Businesses looking for a quick return to normal are running into a big hitch: Workers on unemployment benefits are reluctant to give them up. For some workers, unemployment benefits are now paying more than their old jobs did. For others, safety concerns or a lack of child care, as most schools and day-care centers remain closed, are making them hesitant to go back.

U.S. workers filed 3.2 million jobless claims last week, the Labor Department said. It was the fewest since the week ended March 14, before the pandemic caused claims to rise. Federal Reserve officials said they believe the U.S. economy can avoid a worst-case scenario in the coronavirus crisis, in part because of aggressive action taken by the central bank.

The U.S. unemployment rate likely rose to a record in April as employers shed millions of jobs.

• The European Central Bank has offered to pay eurozone banks if they keep loans flowing to eurozone businesses. But many banks—still struggling with bad loans left over from the last crisis—have turned the central bank down.

WeChat, the Chinese app operated by Tencent Holdings Ltd. with more than one billion users world-wide, is subjecting its international users to surveillance to bolster the censorship machinery it employs to control users inside China, according to a new report.

Like all social-media platforms in China, it is responsible for making sure all content passing through the app toes the Chinese government’s line. It is well known that the domestic version of the app uses a combination of automated and human censorship to identify and scrub criticism of political figures and other content considered taboo in China.

• Google parent Alphabet Inc. abandoned plans to develop a “smart city” in a Toronto neighborhood, a controversial project that once embodied the tech giant’s futuristic ambitions. The project, initially championed by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, ran into local opposition. Activists said they were concerned how the company would handle personal data, and that Google’s algorithms would take too much control over city planning.

About 150,000 seafarers who fly around the globe each month to connect with ships to replace colleagues that have been at sea for months at a time. Widespread travel restrictions that countries have imposed to rein in the spread of the coronavirus have made their travel nearly impossible and have stranded thousands of sailors at sea while their replacement crews are stuck on land without work.

The International Maritime Organization, the United Nations body that regulates global shipping, said Thursday that the inability to rotate crews has emerged as the biggest challenge facing maritime operators, and called on governments to recognize seafarers as essential workers for global supply chains and exempt them from travel barriers.

Liberty Global PLC agreed to combine its U.K. telecommunications business with that of Spain’s Telefónica SA, creating a telecom giant worth nearly $39 billion in the biggest deal since the global coronavirus shutdown started.

Global deal-making across many sectors has been sidelined, with companies shelving plans for potentially risky tie-ups until the impact of the crisis on their businesses and the global economy is clearer. The coronavirus pandemic has complicated the terms of the planned merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV and Peugeot maker PSA Group, for instance.

• Neiman Marcus Group Inc. filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Texas, becoming the latest large retailer to seek a court restructuring during the pandemic that has closed much of the U.S. economy.