Sen. Elizabeth Warren is asking the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate former President Donald Trump’s deal to take his social-media company public.

In a letter sent to SEC Chairman Gary Gensler dated Wednesday, the Massachusetts Democrat said Digital World Acquisition Corp. —which intends to merge with Mr. Trump’s new company—may have committed securities violations by not disclosing that it held private discussions about the merger as early as May.

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In October, Mr. Trump unveiled a digital-media venture—Trump Media & Technology Group—to create a new social network called Truth Social that would go public by merging with DWAC, which is a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Also called a blank-check company, a SPAC is a shell company that lists on a stock exchange with the sole intent of merging with a private company to take it public.

DWAC and Trump Media & Technology Group didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. The SEC declined to comment.

The world of illegal logging might seem far removed from the well-lit offices of the U.S.’s main financial hubs, but the government is hoping bankers can play a part in stopping such crimes, reports Risk & Compliance Journal's Dylan Tokar.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s anti-money-laundering watchdog on Thursday issued its first-ever advisory on environmental crimes, asking banks and other financial institutions to pay special attention to transactions that may be linked to activity that the agency says contributes to climate change and a loss of biodiversity.

A bureau of the Treasury, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is both a regulator and a collector of financial intelligence whose mission it is to stop the flow of money linked to a range of criminal activity.

Although the agency traditionally has focused on crimes such as terrorism, corruption and drug trafficking, the new emphasis on environmental crimes is part and parcel of a governmentwide push by the Biden administration to mitigate the causes of climate change. 

Environmental crime ranks as the third-largest illicit activity in the world, generating hundreds of billions in estimated profits, according to FinCEN.

Ingredion Inc., a publicly held food ingredients manufacturer, has hired Tanya Jaeger de Foras as senior vice president, chief legal officer, corporate secretary and chief compliance officer.

Ms. Jaeger de Foras will be responsible for overseeing Ingredion’s legal, corporate governance, compliance and government-relations efforts world-wide. Her appointment is effective Nov. 29.

Before joining Ingredion, Ms. Jaeger de Foras was chief compliance officer at Whirlpool Corp., as well as deputy general counsel in its global law department. She also held various roles at eyewear company Luxottica SpA (now EssilorLuxottica SA) and at drug maker Pfizer Inc.

Ingredion, of Westchester, Ill., employs around 12,000 people, and in 2020 had net sales of $6 billion, according to a news release.

--David Smagalla

President Biden’s choice to lead a top banking regulator faced criticism at a hearing Thursday from moderate Democrats who hold the key to her nomination, leaving her confirmation prospects uncertain.

Sen. Jon Tester (D., Mont.) and Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.) challenged Saule Omarova on her thinking and past writing on bank oversight. Mr. Tester also pressed her over remarks she made earlier this year calling for smaller oil-and-gas companies to go bankrupt to aid the U.S. in tackling climate change.

Ms. Omarova, who is nominated to become the Comptroller of the Currency, said she misspoke and that her remarks weren’t well-framed. “My intention was…exactly the opposite,” she said. “We need to help those companies to get restructured.”

In three letters to the FTC dated Friday, the Chamber cited potential breaches of administrative procedure that it said could be open to legal challenge. It also was set to file more than 30 requests with the FTC under the Freedom of Information Act, seeking documents that could include Ms. Khan’s personal communications and those of her staff.

Introduced in response to articles in The Wall Street Journal, the legislation is meant to address a longstanding problem: that judges’ financial disclosures aren’t online, are cumbersome to request and sometimes take years to access.

• Robinhood Markets Inc. scored a victory as a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit accusing the brokerage of colluding with electronic trading firm Citadel Securities to stop investors from buying GameStop Corp. and other meme stocks in January.
   
• Jurors in the criminal-fraud trial of Elizabeth Holmes heard this week from two patients who took Theranos Inc. blood tests that returned troubling results: one who believed she could be HIV-positive and another whose results could have been a sign of prostate cancer.

U.S. jobless claims are gradually drifting down toward pre-pandemic levels as employers avoid layoffs and many workers quit or remain sidelined in a tight labor market.

Initial claims for jobless benefits edged down to a seasonally adjusted 268,000 last week from a revised 269,000 a week earlier, the Labor Department said Thursday. Claims are at the lowest level since the pandemic hit the U.S. economy in the spring of 2020.

Though worker filings for unemployment benefits remain above their 2019 weekly average of 218,000, the decline in claims has been much faster than after the 2007-2009 recession.

• A currency crisis is shaking Turkey’s economy, imperiling President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s nearly two-decade-long grip on power and upending living standards in a country that had enjoyed years of growth.
   
• President Biden said the U.S. government is considering a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing, a decision that could bar government officials from attending the games.
   
• Global supply-chain bottlenecks are creating headaches for retailers, delays for consumers—and big gains for financial firms that invested in container ships before the pandemic upended the logistics business.
   
• U.S. authorities on Thursday accused two Iranian nationals of engaging in voter intimidation and election interference ahead of last year’s U.S. presidential election, describing them as “state-sponsored actors” involved in a disinformation campaign.

Lawyers for Canadian technology company Sky Global filed a legal complaint this week alleging that the U.S. government had improperly shut down its encrypted-messaging business and tarred the company and its executives as a criminal enterprise merely for providing secure mobile-phone technology.

The motion, filed in U.S. federal court in San Diego, asks the government to return web domains it seized beginning in March 2021, when Sky Global CEO Jean-François Eap was charged in connection with an alleged criminal enterprise over the technology he and his company made and sold.

• Mobilewalla, a company that collects and sells consumer information gleaned from cellphones, said it was the source of some of the advertising data used by the Department of Homeland Security and other government entities to track mobile phones without warrants, shedding new light on how device location data is harvested and sold in a secretive multibillion-dollar industry.

Sony Group Corp.’s PlayStation unit has asked Activision Blizzard Inc. to explain how it plans to address a Wall Street Journal article about its chief executive’s handling of sexual misconduct issues.

PlayStation boss Jim Ryan disclosed the request in a letter to employees Wednesday that was reviewed by the Journal. In it he said Sony reached out to Activision “to express our deep concern” about the article and that “we do not believe their statements of response properly address the situation.”

The Journal article, which was published on Tuesday, said Activision Chief Executive Bobby Kotick didn’t inform the company’s board of directors about some reports of sexual misconduct by male employees toward female employees, including alleged rapes.

• Two top officials at Pennsylvania’s largest pension fund are retiring amid a federal investigation and calls by some board members for their ouster.

China Huarong Asset Management Co., the country’s biggest buyer of bad loans from banks, said it would receive a $6.5 billion capital injection from state-owned financial institutions, moving forward with a major step in a complicated restructuring.

The Beijing-based company, which is majority owned by China’s Finance Ministry, incurred a huge loss last year and is being bailed out after veering into areas far beyond its core business of managing distressed assets.

The Chinese government’s action to rescue Huarong—which prevented the company from defaulting on billions of dollars in international debt—stands in contrast with its reluctance to bail out property giant China Evergrande Group, whose U.S. dollar bonds have plunged to deeply distressed levels in recent months.

• Detroit’s two biggest auto makers— Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co.—are looking to get into the semiconductor business, after a year of computer-chip shortages that snarled their global factory output.
   
• Cash-strapped property giant China Evergrande Group said it will sell its entire stake in a company that provides online video-streaming and Internet home services for the equivalent of $273 million, closing a chapter in a six-year business venture with internet behemoth Tencent Holdings Ltd.
   
• CVS Health Corp. said Thursday it will close 900 stores over the next three years, nearly 10% of its U.S. locations, while adding more health services at remaining locations.

Parts of Europe are again locking down to prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed by a steep rise in Covid-19 patients as data shows a rise in infections among vaccinated people who are passing on the disease.

The German state of Saxony declared it would go into a partial lockdown for two or three weeks starting Monday, closing bars, restaurants and clubs and canceling all large events. Other badly hit German states are considering similar measures and may announce them in the coming days.

• Pfizer Inc. said Thursday it agreed to a $5.29 billion deal with the U.S. to provide enough supplies of its promising Covid-19 pill to treat 10 million people, should health regulators give it the green light.
   
• An agreement to waive the intellectual-property rights underpinning Covid-19 vaccines—a prospect poor countries have hoped would ease supplies to the developing world—is becoming increasingly unlikely, say people familiar with the situation, with the U.S. not acting to bridge disagreements between developing world countries and those opposing such a measure.

A bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general said Thursday it is investigating how Instagram attracts and affects young people, amping up the pressure on parent company Meta Platforms Inc. over potential harms to its users.

Led by eight states, including Massachusetts and Nebraska, the coalition is focused on “the techniques utilized by Meta to increase the frequency and duration of engagement by young users and the resulting harms caused by such extended engagement.”

The attorneys general said they are investigating whether the company, formerly known as Facebook, violated consumer protection laws and put the public at risk.

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