Good morning. President-elect Joe Biden is expected to choose Gary Gensler, a former financial regulator and Goldman Sachs executive, to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to people familiar with the decision.

Mr. Gensler’s nomination would please liberal Democrats who cheered the former regulator’s tough approach to rule-making during the Obama administration, when he spearheaded the overhaul of derivatives markets mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and oversaw enforcement actions against investment banks accused of manipulating benchmark interest rates. The choice of Mr. Gensler, who declined to comment, wasn’t final and could still change, the people said.

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As head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2009 to 2014, Mr. Gensler developed a reputation among his colleagues for bare-knuckle tactics as he drove to create a regulatory framework for derivatives, a multi-trillion dollar market that had largely been free from federal oversight. By the time he left the commission, the rule set was largely complete, years before other regulators wrapped up their postcrisis work.

Mr. Gensler was tapped to lead the CFTC in 2009, as the agency’s mission was expanding to address risks to financial stability posed by derivatives, financial instruments including options and futures that are derived from other assets. In that role, Mr. Gensler drew the ire of Wall Street banks as he implemented Dodd Frank.

Jeff Horowitz began work as BitGo’s chief compliance officer on Jan. 4, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said Wednesday. Mr. Horowitz previously served for more than two years as the top compliance executive of San Francisco-based Coinbase. Mr. Horowitz will replace Matthew Parrella, who left BitGo at the end of last year, according to a company spokeswoman.

• Visa abandoned its $5.3 billion planned acquisition of financial-technology firm Plaid Inc. amid a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit that challenged the deal. The department sued to block the deal in November, alleging the acquisition would allow Visa to unlawfully maintain a monopoly in the online debit-card market. Plaid, the government argued, was a nascent but important competitive threat to Visa, and eliminating that threat would lead to higher prices, less innovation and higher entry barriers for online debit services.
   
• Boeing’s drone unit has agreed to pay $25 million to settle civil fraud allegations that it overcharged on more than half a dozen contracts signed with the U.S. Navy and special forces between 2009 and 2017.
   
• Imerys SA is pressing ahead in an effort to get out from under lawsuits over its U.S. mining operation, Imerys Talc America Inc., over the protests of health-care company Johnson & Johnson.
   
• The Environmental Protection Agency is creating higher barriers for regulating the emissions that contribute to climate change, setting new rules that effectively block the federal government from imposing new restrictions on several heavy industries. The agency, which first introduced a proposal to create the higher bar in August, packaged these new standards in a rule making it issued Tuesday.
   
• Police in South Korea are scouring the country for leads in the disappearance of the equivalent of $13 million from the Landing Casino. Hong Kong-based casino operator Landing International Development Ltd. has asked police to look for a female employee from Malaysia who had been in charge of the cash but hadn’t returned to work after leaving for a vacation at the end of December.

A breach at email security provider Mimecast Inc. underscores that Russia-linked hackers appear to have targeted victims along multiple avenues of attack in what is shaping up to be one of the most successful cyber campaigns of U.S. government and corporate systems.

The attack potentially adds thousands of victims to the yearslong intelligence operation and likely aimed at gaining access to email systems, security experts say. Mimecast, in a Tuesday blog post, said the hackers were able to obtain a digital certificate used by the company to access its customers’ Microsoft 365 office productivity services.

The Mimecast hackers used tools and techniques that link them to the hackers who broke into Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds Corp., according to people familiar with the investigation. SolarWinds, meanwhile, said Tuesday that its breach began at least a month earlier than first disclosed.

• The Sriwijaya Air jet that crashed Saturday didn’t fly for nearly nine months last year, with air travel severely reduced because of the coronavirus pandemic, Indonesia’s transportation ministry said, as search crews pulled one of the plane’s so-called black boxes from the Java Sea. The Boeing Co. 737-500 was inspected and declared airworthy before resuming flying operations, the ministry said.
   
• President-elect Joe Biden’s trade policy will focus on helping American workers by ensuring trade agreements protect and enhance U.S. jobs, his nominee for the top trade-policy job said Tuesday. The new administration’s policy priorities also include confronting China over its trade practices and enforcing the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement signed by President Trump last year with bipartisan support.

• One of the Trump Organization’s most loyal partners, lender Deutsche Bank, is moving to distance itself from the president’s business and is unlikely to lend it more money following last week’s Capitol riot, said a person familiar with the matter. The bank has lent the Trump Organization more than $300 million that will mature in 2023 and 2024, forcing the company to refinance the debt or pay it off by potentially selling assets.
   
• YouTube suspended Mr. Trump’s channel Tuesday night, joining a growing list of tech companies that are ejecting him from their platforms. The Alphabet Inc. video-sharing service said it was locking Mr. Trump’s channel for at least seven days after the company removed videos that it said violated its policies against content it believes could incite violence.

• Lawyer L. Lin Wood Wood has accused casino magnate Steve Wynn, a former client, of disparaging him to President Trump. He said he has demanded millions of dollars from Mr. Wynn for reputational damage with the president and suggested that secret settlements he negotiated for Mr. Wynn could become public knowledge if the parties can’t come to terms. In an interview, Mr. Wood said he warned Mr. Wynn’s lawyers that the legal work he did for Mr. Wynn would be fair game in a defamation lawsuit.

Iran and Cuba have begun trials of a joint Covid-19 vaccine, as Tehran fights the worst coronavirus outbreak in the Middle East while pledging not to use vaccines from the U.S. and U.K.

The Cuban vaccine, called Soberana 02, is the most advanced of Cuba’s four vaccine candidates and will be developed in cooperation between Cuba’s Finlay Vaccine Institute and Iran’s Pasteur Institute, authorities from both countries said Monday. The cooperation between two staunch opponents of the U.S., which are both under U.S. sanctions, reflects a shared drive for self-sufficiency and less reliance on imports from the West.

• At least two federal agencies worked to distribute Covid-19 tests from a Chinese genetics company, despite warnings about security risks from U.S. intelligence and security officials, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
   
• U.S. to Require Covid-19 Tests for All International Visitors
• Uber, Lyft Push Biden Team for Role in Vaccine Rollout
• AstraZeneca Applies for European Clearance of Vaccine

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

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