Good morning. A unit of Gunvor Group, one of the world’s largest energy commodity trading firms, has agreed to pay about $661 million after it admitted to bribing Ecuadorean officials.

• The case: Gunvor SA entered a guilty plea Friday to a conspiracy charge in Brooklyn, N.Y., federal court. Prosecutors from the Justice Department said Gunvor paid bribes to officials at Ecuador’s ministry of hydrocarbons and to state-oil company Petroecuador to win contracts to buy oil products.
   
• How much? The company was sentenced to pay $374 million in fines and forfeit $287 million in ill-gotten gains, but will receive credit for amounts paid to authorities in Switzerland and Ecuador, prosecutors said.
   
• What happened to the CFTC case? Gunvor previously had said that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission also was conducting an investigation, but said Friday it isn’t aware of further outstanding matters. The CFTC didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether it had closed its probe.
   
• Company's response: Gunvor said it cooperated extensively with the Justice Department investigation, which led to a significant reduction in fines. The company also has made efforts to strengthen its compliance program, it said.

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Lawyers who got Musk pay struck down seek $5.6 billion in Tesla stock.

Lawyers for a Tesla shareholder who helped scuttle Elon Musk’s $55.8 billion compensation package asked a Delaware court on Friday to approve legal fees worth about $5.6 billion.

Big potential paycheck. It would be a record-breaking payday for the attorneys if approved. Instead of cash, the attorneys asked to be paid almost entirely in Tesla stock, a rare request from lawyers on the winning side of a verdict.

Impact of original case. Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick’s January decision to strike down Musk’s pay package at Tesla was the largest verdict in the history of the Delaware Chancery Court.

Top Swiss central banker Thomas Jordan to step down.

Switzerland's top central banker is stepping down later this year, ending a 12-year tenure marked by dramatic currency moves, radical monetary policy, and the failure of one of the country’s biggest banks.

Yet Swiss National Bank Chairman Thomas Jordan, 61, ultimately reinforced Switzerland’s reputation for steady and sound financial management. Under his tenure, the SNB gave the ailing bank billions of emergency funding during a run in March 2023. The liquidity helped UBS buy and stabilize Credit Suisse.

• U.S. officials across the political spectrum have described Chinese corporate theft as a defining threat of our times. A Justice Department loss last week underscores the challenges in addressing it.
   
• Facebook owner Meta said it won’t enter into new deals with traditional news publishers in Australia and the U.S.
   
• Two years after the invasion of Ukraine, drones and U.S.-made computer chips are increasingly flowing to Russia from China through Central Asian trade routes, showing the difficulty of strangling supplies to Moscow’s war effort.
   
• The U.S. Postal Service’s long-haul trucking contractors were in crashes that killed at least 89 people from late 2018 through 2022 and the agency long failed to track such incidents, according to a new report by the mail service’s inspector general.
   
• A bipartisan tax bill soared out of the House earlier this year, backed by a surprisingly broad coalition that included antitax activists, liberal groups, antiabortion advocates and businesses. But it landed with a decided thud among Senate Republicans, and the path ahead is murky at best.
   
• Sen. Bob Menendez’s defense against public-corruption charges suffered a blow Friday when a businessman pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe the New Jersey Democrat and agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors.

Signs of trouble at regional banks reignite sector fears.

Bank stocks slid Friday, led by a 26% decline in New York Community Bancorp, after more signs of trouble at that lender and a smaller peer revived fears about the stability of the sector a year after a string of high-profile failures.

NYCB closed at its lowest level since 1997. The bank disclosed late Thursday that management had identified “material weaknesses” in internal controls related to the way it monitors and assesses risk in its loan books. Those loans have been under scrutiny because of the bank’s high exposure to commercial real estate that has fallen in value.

“That language is particularly troubling,” said Steve Moss, a director at Raymond James. “That creates a lot of risk and uncertainty.”

The world is in for another China shock.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the U.S. and the global economy experienced a “China shock,” a boom in imports of cheap Chinese-made goods that helped keep inflation low but at the cost of local manufacturing jobs. 

The issue. A sequel might be in the making as Beijing doubles down on exports to revive the country’s growth. Its factories are churning out more cars, machinery and consumer electronics than its domestic economy can absorb. Propped up by cheap, state-directed loans, Chinese companies are glutting foreign markets with products they can’t sell at home.

• Chinese Gangs Use Cryptocurrencies to Launder Billions
• What’s Wrong With China’s Economy, in Eight Charts

• Conflict in the Middle East is drawing fresh attention to one of the internet’s deepest vulnerabilities: the Red Sea.
   
• Global carbon-dioxide emissions reached a record high last year as extreme droughts hampered hydroelectric production across large economies, leading to a substantial increase in fossil fuel use, according to the International Energy Agency.
   
• As companies race to build the latest and greatest software for their businesses, they are overloading their tech balance sheets with an oft-ignored kind of debt known as “technical debt.”
   
• As migration hits record levels worldwide, a debate is building among economists over whether some industries are becoming too dependent on foreign labor.
   
• The U.S. and other countries called for investigations into how scores of Gazans were killed near an aid convoy, as the Israeli military gave an initial estimate that it killed fewer than 10 people when its troops shot at a crowd of Palestinians nearby.

Medical providers fight to survive after Change Healthcare hack.

Some healthcare providers say they could be wiped out after a cyberattack last week brought insurance reimbursements and prescription processing to a halt for much of the industry.

Money on hold. Many medical practices have now gone without any revenue for well over a week as a result of the ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, as they remain unable to bill insurers or determine copays for patients.

• The Port of Rotterdam is preparing to test quantum technology in an effort to secure communications at one of the busiest supply-chain hubs in the world.

• An investor group seeking to buy Macy’s is raising its offer by nearly $1 billion after the beleaguered department-store chain rebuffed its prior proposal as too low.
   
• Voters are shedding some of their pessimism about the economy, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds, but the more upbeat mood is producing only a marginal improvement in views of President Biden.
   
• Climate investing is booming at BlackRock. Just don’t call it ESG.
   
• The AI wars have begun, and the humans are throwing the first punches.
   
• Since the invasion of Ukraine, prominent Russians have died in unusual circumstances on three continents.

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