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The Morning Risk Report: Companies Face Patchwork of Covid-19 Rules After Supreme Court Ruling
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Good morning. Business leaders who were scrambling to survey employees on their vaccination status and line up scarce testing resources breathed a sigh of relief after the Supreme Court overturned the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test mandate for large private employers.
The relief was short-lived. The surging Omicron variant has renewed the debate over how long the coronavirus pandemic will adversely affect companies in a range of industries. As news of the Jan. 13 Supreme Court ruling receded, businesses turned to grapple with a new set of challenges around how to keep their employees safe and productive, Risk & Compliance Journal's Dylan Tokar reports.
[Continued below...]
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U.S. companies have reacted in disparate ways to the Supreme Court ruling. Some companies and business associations have expressed disappointment over the ruling, while others say they prefer having flexibility to tailor their approach to their workforces.
Many businesses are now re-evaluating plans for testing, and responding to new federal rules that require private insurers to cover the cost of over-the-counter Covid-19 tests, according to legal and health experts.
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From Risk & Compliance Journal
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Swedbank Names New Chief Compliance Officer
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Swedbank AB has hired Britta Hjorth-Larsen as its new chief compliance officer, ending a four-month search.
Ms. Hjorth-Larsen will succeed Ingrid Harbo, who is slated to retire on March 31. Ms. Hjorth-Larsen will begin working at the Swedish bank on Aug. 1 at the latest, the company said Friday. She currently serves as head of nonfinancial risk at Bank of Ireland Group PLC.
Between 1999 and 2020, Ms. Hjorth-Larsen worked in various roles at Nordea Bank Abp, including as head of business risk management and governance, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Swedbank came under scrutiny in February 2019 after a Swedish TV broadcaster reported that billions of dollars of potentially illicit funds may have passed through the bank’s Estonian branch.
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The Justice Department said it would appeal a ruling that blocked the Biden administration’s Covid-19 vaccine requirement for federal workers. PHOTO: CHARLES KRUPA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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A federal judge blocked the Biden administration’s Covid-19 vaccine requirement for federal employees, the latest legal setback for the president’s push to inoculate workers.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown in Texas said President Biden didn’t have the broad, unilateral authority to mandate “that all federal employees consent to vaccination against Covid-19 or lose their jobs.”
The judge’s ruling Friday said that the case wasn’t about whether people should be vaccinated.
“It is instead about whether the President can, with the stroke of a pen and without the input of Congress, require millions of federal employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of their employment,” Judge Brown, an appointee of former President Donald Trump who is based in Galveston, wrote. “That, under the current state of the law as just recently expressed by the Supreme Court, is a bridge too far.”
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One week after apparel company Carhartt Inc. declared it was keeping its Covid-19 vaccine mandate in place, the company defended its plans despite growing pushback from customers and on social media.
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Some people said they would stop buying Carhartt products and said the company shouldn’t be forcing its employees to choose between getting vaccinated and keeping their job. Other customers welcomed the company’s mandate and thanked Carhartt for keeping their employees safe.
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A review by Credit Suisse Group AG of the travel of Chairman António Horta-Osório found it was paying for planes to return empty after dropping him off in London and Lisbon.
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Microsoft Corp. could have its work cut out getting Activision Blizzard Inc.’s sustainability programs up to its own standards if the $75 billion acquisition goes ahead.
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Alphabet Inc.’s Google asked a federal judge Friday to dismiss an antitrust lawsuit brought by Texas and more than a dozen state attorneys general, arguing that they failed to show the search giant’s digital advertising practices were anticompetitive.
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The Biden administration Friday suspended dozens of flights operated by Chinese airlines, in response to similar measures taken by China’s aviation authorities in recent weeks.
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A former associate of Rudy Giuliani was sentenced by a federal judge Friday to a year and a day in prison on a campaign-finance charge, capping the fall of a key figure in the first impeachment inquiry into former President Donald Trump.
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken greets Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov before their meeting in Geneva. PHOTO: POOL/REUTERS
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Washington and Moscow on Friday agreed to continue talks triggered by Russia’s military buildup near the Ukrainian border, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying the U.S. would formally address the Kremlin’s concerns that Western powers threaten Russian security and its demands regarding the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Mr. Blinken, after meeting his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, said the U.S. would also submit its own security proposals and that the two sides planned to meet again. In Washington later, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki indicated the U.S. wouldn’t concede to the Kremlin’s key demand that Ukraine be forbidden to join the NATO alliance.
“We’ve been very clear about what we are not negotiating on, which is the sovereignty of Ukraine, which is this question that is continuously raised about Ukraine’s right to pursue joining NATO,” she said. “That’s up to NATO countries to make that decision.”
Mr. Blinken said after meeting Mr. Lavrov, “There is no trade space there—none.”
Related: Russia Hatching Plot to Replace Ukraine Government, U.K. Says
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A $250 billion spending initiative to boost U.S. investment in high-tech research and manufacturing has stalled in the House. The Senate passed its version—called the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act—last year with bipartisan supporters, saying the U.S. needs to make big investments in science and technology to meet the challenge posed by China and other global rivals.
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Germany’s dependence on Russian gas has left Europe short of options to sanction Moscow if it invades Ukraine—and itself vulnerable should Russia stop gas exports to the West.
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The Federal Reserve is entering an unfamiliar environment at the start of 2022. For the first time in decades, officials are preparing to raise interest rates when inflation is uncomfortably high rather than very low.
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Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market value, fell below $37,000 Friday to its lowest dollar value since August 2021, according to CoinDesk. The selloff continued into the weekend, with Bitcoin falling to below $35,000 on Saturday before edging back above that level as of Sunday afternoon.
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Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman was awarded about $25 million in company stock and about $10 million in cash. PHOTO: AARON BERNSTEIN/REUTERS
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Morgan Stanley paid Chief Executive Officer James Gorman $35 million for his work in 2021, a 6% raise from the previous year and his largest pay package ever since taking the helm in 2010.
Morgan Stanley’s board of directors awarded Mr. Gorman about $25 million in company stock and about $10 million in cash, including a bonus of about $8 million, according to a securities filing Friday.
Four-fifths of Mr. Gorman’s stock award is tied to how well the bank performs over the next few years.
For his work in 2020, Mr. Gorman received a compensation package valued at $33 million.
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An activist investor wants Peloton Interactive Inc. to fire its chief executive and explore a sale after the stationary-bike maker’s stock plummeted more than 80% from its high, as growth slowed.
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Kraft Heinz Co. ’s Paulo Basilio intends to step down as chief financial officer on March 1 and Andre Maciel, currently U.S. CFO and head of digital transformation, will succeed him, the company said on Friday.
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Workers install solar panels atop a building in San Francisco. PHOTO: JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
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Blackstone Inc. has launched a credit strategy to back companies that help reduce carbon emissions, an initiative that fits into the asset manager’s plan to invest $100 billion in such businesses during the next decade.
The private-capital giant, with about $731 billion in assets under management, has a variety of other investment strategies, such as energy, infrastructure and private equity, that it can draw on to help meet that goal. Blackstone’s new sustainable resources credit platform seeks to benefit from the massive capital requirements—estimated at more than $100 trillion by the International Renewable Energy Agency—needed by 2050 to shift the world economy to clean energy.
Credit investments will account for a big portion of that capital, said Robert Horn, a senior managing director at Blackstone Credit and global head of its sustainable resources group. He leads the new strategy.
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International Business Machines Corp. agreed to sell the data and analytics assets of its Watson Health business to investment firm Francisco Partners, the companies said on Friday. The deal is the latest step by IBM to refocus its core business around the cloud.
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ByteDance is one of China’s hottest startups and was last valued at $180 billion after a fundraising round in late 2020. PHOTO: ALEX PLAVEVSKI/SHUTTERSTOCK
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Revenue at Chinese social-media giant ByteDance Ltd. rose by about 70% last year to roughly $58 billion, slowing from a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, as Beijing tightened scrutiny over its internet sector and as an economic slowdown hit advertising sales.
The Beijing-based maker of popular short-video platform TikTok and its mainland Chinese counterpart, Douyin, briefed senior staff members about its financial performance this week, the people said. In 2020, ByteDance’s revenue more than doubled from the previous year to $34.3 billion, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
Over the past year, Chinese officials have introduced data-collection and antimonopoly rules to curb the influence of the country’s most powerful technology companies. China’s leaders have criticized “the disorderly expansion of capital” and expressed concerns about the cybersecurity and social-stability risks arising from big tech’s control of the data of millions of citizens and their influence over everyday life.
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The Biden and Trump administrations had years of warnings. But the government failed this week to avoid a collision between U.S. telecom companies and airlines over the rollout of new 5G cellular networks.
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From South America’s avocado, corn and coffee farms to Southeast Asia’s plantations of coconuts and oil palms, high fertilizer prices are weighing on farmers across the developing world, making it much costlier to cultivate and forcing many to cut back on production.
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Airbus SE scrapped a $6 billion jet contract with Qatar Airways Ltd., part of an escalating legal battle between the two over paint.
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A unionization push among Starbucks Corp. workers is spreading across the U.S., challenging executives’ efforts to curb labor organization within the nation’s biggest coffee chain.
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Pressure has begun to ease on U.S. hospitals hit by the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, while some European governments took steps to reopen activities that were closed during the worst of the wave.
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Vaccines and booster shots offer superior protection from the Delta and Omicron variants, according to three new studies released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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The Omicron wave of coronavirus cases is weighing on the U.S. labor force, keeping millions of people home sick while others say they are working through illnesses.
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Researchers and U.S. health regulators worry Covid-19 will figure out a way to evade important new pills, prompting efforts to look for signs of such resistance and find combinations to thwart it.
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