Good morning. A former high-level FBI agent was indicted on charges he violated U.S. sanctions by accepting secret payments from Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska for work he did investigating a rival oligarch.

Charles McGonigal, who retired from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2018 after serving as special agent in charge of counterintelligence in its New York field office, was arrested Saturday at John F. Kennedy International Airport, federal prosecutors said.

The arrest, which occurred alongside that of a former Russian diplomat, represents an about-turn for Mr. McGonigal, who previously supervised investigations into Mr. Deripaska and other Russian oligarchs. He also had been involved in a multiyear investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The indictment of Mr. McGonigal is a rare legal action against a former senior law-enforcement official. His prosecution comes as the Justice Department seeks to step up its efforts to investigate lawyers and others who assist Russian oligarchs, as part of the Biden administration’s pressure campaign against President Vladimir Putin following the invasion of Ukraine.

Mr. Deripaska, a raw-materials magnate who founded Russian aluminum giant Rusal, has been a focus of prosecutors. Long suspected by the U.S. of ties to Russian organized crime, he has spent lavishly over the years to try to burnish his reputation in the West, and to obtain permission to travel to the U.S., specifically.

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Elon testifies in class-action suit. Elon Musk said he had funding to take Tesla Inc. private when he floated the idea in 2018, saying that financing from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund and his own stake in rocket-company SpaceX would have provided sufficient capital.

“With the SpaceX stock alone, I felt funding was secured,” Mr. Musk said Monday in his second day on the stand in a case brought by investors who say they lost money because of his tweets proposing to take Tesla private.

Mr. Musk met with representatives of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, in late July 2018, a week before floating the possibility of taking the car company private. A specific price for taking Tesla private wasn’t discussed at that meeting, nor was there a signed document, Mr. Musk testified. Nevertheless, Mr. Musk said he walked away from the meeting thinking it was a “done deal.”

The class-action case being tried in federal court in San Francisco centers on the Tesla chief executive’s tweets more than four years ago floating the possibility of taking the company private and the effect they had on individual investors’ decision-making.

Google’s big India opportunity faces a challenge. India wants to tame big tech’s dominance and it has its antitrust sights on Alphabet Inc.’s Google. The giant company will be a tough nut to crack.

Last week, Google lost an appeal in India’s Supreme Court to block an antitrust order that requires it to make significant changes to the way its Android operating system does business with smartphone makers, app developers and users. It strikes at the company’s core business model for Android and may force the tech giant to alter its approach in its largest market.

In October, the country’s antitrust watchdog fined Google the equivalent of $162 million for allegedly abusing its dominance of the Android ecosystem and ruled in favor of unbundling its apps from its open-source operating system. India’s antitrust remedies, influenced by a similar case in Europe back in 2018, are far more stringent and the scale of change required is much larger. Google said it is reviewing the details of the Supreme Court’s decision and will cooperate with the antitrust agency on the way forward, in parallel with its appeal

In other legal news...

• The double-murder trial of disbarred lawyer Alex Murdaugh began Monday with the scion of one of South Carolina’s most powerful families facing charges of fatally shooting his wife, Maggie, and son Paul at the family hunting estate.
   
• The U.S. drug-trafficking trial of Mexico’s former top law-enforcement official began Monday, with prosecutors accusing him of helping one of the world’s most powerful cartels smuggle cocaine.

SEC scrutiny blocks some crypto firms from going public. Crypto companies seeking to go public over the past year have faced increased scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission, as financial distress and failures spread across the volatile industry.

Crypto-focused companies including Bullish Global, Circle Internet Financial and eToro Group Ltd. have failed to secure the SEC approvals that are required of companies going public. The firms were seeking stock-exchange listings through mergers with special-purpose acquisition companies, an alternative path to going public that thrived in 2020 and 2021 before heightened regulatory checks and market turbulence ended the SPAC boom.

Market recovery hinges on quick inflation drop. Behind this year’s improved start for markets lies a broad wager that inflation will soon post a once-in-a-generation decline.

Market-based gauges of inflation expectations project the annual pace of rising prices will tumble in the months ahead roughly as fast as during the recession that followed the 2008 financial crisis—or when Fed Chairman Paul Volcker used double-digit interest rates to crush the soaring inflation of the late 1970s.

Hopes for a quick return to 2% inflation have encouraged bets that the Federal Reserve will pause and even reverse its interest-rate hikes this year.

Salesforce’s business model faces test. Salesforce Inc., which pioneered cloud software to become one of the largest companies in technology, has hit a rough patch in recent months as slowing growth and employee turmoil damp enthusiasm about its business.

On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Elliott Management Corp. had made a multibillion-dollar investment in the company. In October, Starboard Value LP said it had taken a stake in the company.

A former chief executive of the medical device company Medtronic PLC, Mr. Ishrak will remain on Intel’s board as an independent director and serve on the audit and finance committee and corporate governance and nominating committee. He has been on Intel’s board since 2017.

Spotify is home to latest tech layoff. Spotify Technology SA is laying off about 600 employees, or roughly 6%, of its workforce as part of broader cost-cutting measures after the streaming company went on a spending spree during the pandemic.

The company’s move is the latest in a wave of technology layoffs, as the industry recalibrates after growing rapidly over the past few years and ahead of a potential recession.

Striking machinery workers approve new contract. Union workers at two plants for CNH Industrial NV ratified a new contract with the farm and construction equipment maker, ending a strike that began in early May.

About 1,100 members of the United Auto Workers union at plants in Racine, Wis., and Burlington, Iowa, will start returning to work Jan. 30, the company said. The workers walked off their jobs May 2, after rejecting an offer from the company that union leaders said provided insufficient wage increases and higher employee expenses for health insurance coverage.