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The Morning Risk Report: Justice Department Officials Dig In on Corporate Repeat Offenders
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Good morning. Companies looking to resolve with the Justice Department criminal violations such as bribery should prepare for a very thorough review of their prior sins, officials said Wednesday.
Justice Department leadership has said the agency will step up enforcement against white-collar criminals, including by taking a harder look at corporations with long histories of prior offenses, Risk & Compliance Journal’s Dylan Tokar reports.
[Continued below...]
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Officials on Wednesday defended the new stance on corporate recidivism, which drew skepticism from white-collar defense lawyers gathered at an annual conference on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The law, which prohibits the payment of bribes to foreign public officials, is one of the Justice Department’s highest-profile white-collar enforcement programs, garnering billions of dollars in corporate fines in recent years.
“As a baseline…we’re gonna be starting from the perspective that it’s all potentially relevant,” said David Last, chief of the Justice Department’s FCPA unit, who spoke at the American Conference Institute’s 38th International Conference on the FCPA in National Harbor, Md. That includes all federal, state and international offenses, as well as all criminal, civil and regulatory violations, he added.
“And look, if there are so many instances to count, that may be another conversation that we need to have,” Mr. Last added. “If you’re in the 50s, or the hundreds of prior touches, that’s something we probably need to know.”
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FCPA Case Pipeline Remains Strong, DOJ Official Says
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Top government officials at the ACI’s annual FCPA conference explained new policy developments, and told observers not to read too much into a recent dip in the number of foreign bribery enforcement actions.
“What does the pipeline of cases look like, particularly in light of a second year of a pandemic? The answer is that the pipeline is very strong,” said David Last, chief of the Justice Department’s FCPA unit.
The Justice Department’s case detection methods, including whistleblowers and voluntary self-disclosures, haven’t been affected by the pandemic, he said. The department also has been receiving growing numbers of referrals from its foreign counterparts, a trend Mr. Last described as a “gamechanger.”
Mr. Last was asked about a recent policy change, requiring companies to provide information on all individuals involved in potential misconduct in order to get cooperation credit. “The simple view is that companies and their counsel are not in a position to assess relevance and culpability of individuals,” he said. “That’s not their job.”
“That’s our role as prosecutors—to see what’s relevant in terms of culpability, as to individuals,” he added.
—Dylan Tokar
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Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who became a whistleblower, testified before a House committee on Wednesday. PHOTO: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
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House lawmakers signaled Wednesday they would press forward with legislation to make internet platforms more accountable to online users, in what is expected to be a showdown between Washington and Silicon Valley.
Legislators are seeking to scale back the legal protections that generally allow social-media platforms such as Twitter Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook to post user content without being liable for it.
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Match Group Inc. has settled a lawsuit filed by a group of founders and executives of the Tinder dating app that had alleged the company undervalued Tinder to cheat them out of billions of dollars.
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In 2019, Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos accused the National Enquirer of attempting to extort him with embarrassing texts and photos, and his security team suggested that Saudi Arabia could have gleaned this data by hacking his phone. Probes by the U.S. government haven’t led to any public action on either front.
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A lawyer for Ghislaine Maxwell tried to cast doubt on an accuser’s testimony at the British socialite’s sex-trafficking trial on Wednesday, challenging the woman’s memory and showing inconsistencies with earlier statements she made to federal investigators.
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A group of five educational publishers sued Shopify Inc., claiming the e-commerce company is liable for the unauthorized school textbooks, test packs and solutions manuals sold by websites using Shopify’s online tools.
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CNN anchor Chris Cuomo said being suspended by the network was embarrassing, addressing the controversy over his role in the sexual-harassment scandal involving his brother, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for the first time since the network took him off the air.
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In their race to vaccinate staff against Covid-19, America’s largest miners struggle most in one country: the U.S.
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The survey showed a significant increase in Americans of both parties who see China as the biggest threat to the U.S. PHOTO: THOMAS PETER/REUTERS
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Americans listed China as the nation’s top foe and their trust in the U.S. military dropped to its lowest levels in three years, according to the first major national-security survey conducted since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
For the first time since the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute began surveying Americans about national security four years ago, a majority of Americans—52%—named China as the nation posing the greatest threat to the U.S. That is up from 21% four years ago. Russia came in at a distant 14%—a shift from three years ago when 30% of Americans considered that country to be the biggest risk, while China came in second place at 21%.
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Exxon Mobil Corp. said Wednesday it will maintain a conservative budget for the next five years, as the outlook for oil and gas demand remains murky while coronavirus-led economic risks persist and some countries attempt to wean themselves off fossil fuels.
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Russia ordered U.S. Embassy staff who have been in Moscow for more than three years to leave the country by Jan. 31, a move that comes a day before diplomats hold talks to address the worsening relationship between the two countries.
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Turkey’s central bank moved Wednesday to prop up the country’s collapsing currency, selling foreign reserves after the lira reached new lows following comments by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in defense of his unorthodox economic policies.
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Theme parks such as Walt Disney World had taken a financial hit from the Covid-19 pandemic. PHOTO: JOHN RAOUX/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Walt Disney Co.’s board of directors has elected Susan Arnold its new chairman, replacing Robert Iger, the longtime chief executive who is set to depart from the company later this month.
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Twitter Inc. promoted its chief technology officer to chief executive earlier this week. Experts say such a move is rare, although technology skills increasingly are valued in the corner office.
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UBS Group AG named JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive Sarah Youngwood as its next chief financial officer, another high-profile hire of an American banking veteran as the Swiss bank takes on wealth-management rivals in the U.S.
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WeWork said in a securities filing that it would restate several quarters of results, including its latest quarter, after management found material weakness in internal control. PHOTO: JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES
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WeWork Inc. said in a securities filing it would restate several quarters of its results, including its latest one, and that management has concluded there was a material weakness in its internal control.
The office-sharing company, which went public last month through a combination with BowX Acquisition Corp., a special-purpose acquisition company, said Wednesday the reinstatement relates to accounting classification of common shares issued as part of BowX’s initial public offering.
It classified a portion of those shares as permanent equity. Given that the shares had “certain redemption features not solely within the company’s control,” they should have been classified as temporary equity.
Given the classification error, “there was a material weakness in internal control over financial reporting relating to the interpretation and accounting for certain complex features of the public shares,” the company said in a securities filing.
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President Biden spoke about supply-chain issues during the holiday season at the White House on Wednesday. PHOTO: EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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President Biden said that prices for everything from groceries to gas remain high but sought to assure Americans that his administration is tackling supply logjams.
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You don’t have to go to another job interview without knowing how much you can actually make. People applying to jobs at big companies can get an idea of what their salary might be by looking for a similar opening in Colorado.
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