Good morning! Greater numbers of people working from home during the coronavirus pandemic could be having an added effect: More workers feel emboldened to report possible corporate malfeasance directly to regulators.

The 12,210 tips received by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from the U.S. and 133 other countries was a 76% increase from the prior year and the largest number the program has received in a single fiscal year since the program was established by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, according to the whistleblower office’s annual report to Congress published last week.

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The tip volume began to increase in spring 2020, when some whistleblower lawyers began to suggest that the increase could be linked to would-be tipsters working outside the reach of snooping colleagues and managers.

The most recent report, while demonstrating the program’s continued success, also could indicate the remote-working environment might be making tipsters less concerned about possible workplace intimidation, said Erika Kelton, a partner at law firm Phillips & Cohen LLP who represents whistleblowers. She added that her practice also has seen a steadily increasing number of people reaching out over the past year.

“There can be a corporate culture of silence and a culture of certain practice being OK when you’re doing it,” she said. “When you’re not in the office, that culture becomes very diffused...The bounds of loyalty [are] a bit lowered as well.”

Europe’s largest budget airline, Ryanair Holdings PLC, plans to ditch its London listing, citing low trading volumes and a desire to accelerate efforts to comply with European Union ownership requirements.

EU rules call for all airlines based in member states to be at least 50% owned by shareholders from within the bloc, a requirement the Irish carrier has struggled to meet ever since the U.K. split from the EU at the start of last year.

• Enforcement fines levied against Wall Street firms and public companies fell 18% in the first year of the Biden administration, according to newly released statistics.
   
• McKinsey & Co. has agreed to pay $18 million to settle allegations that it didn’t adequately guard against the risk of insider trading involving investments in companies for which the firm was also a consultant.
   
• As Elizabeth Holmes takes the stand in the criminal case against her, her testimony faces a challenge: persuading jurors that whatever her missteps, she didn’t intend to defraud.
   
• Alex Murdaugh, the disgraced South Carolina lawyer who is facing charges of swindling his late housekeeper’s sons out of millions of dollars in an insurance settlement, has been indicted on new financial-crimes charges.
   
• KinderCare Education, one of the nation’s largest for-profit child-care providers, said it would indefinitely delay an initial public offering due to unspecified regulatory delays.
   
• Activision Blizzard Chief Executive Bobby Kotick has told senior managers he would consider leaving the company if he can’t quickly fix the culture problems at the videogame giant, according to people familiar with his comments.
   
• Democrats are close to passing significant changes to international corporate taxation, moving toward a system that would reduce the gaps between nations’ tax rates and—if it all works as planned—making taxes a less important consideration for where companies put investments, profits and headquarters.

Iranian hackers last year infiltrated the computer systems of Lee Enterprises Inc., a major American media company that publishes dozens of daily newspapers across the U.S., as part of a broader effort to spread disinformation about the 2020 presidential election, according to people familiar with the matter.

On Thursday, the Justice Department said the alleged hackers broke in to the digital systems of an unnamed media company in fall 2020 and tested how to create false news content. People familiar with the matter on Friday identified the company as Lee Enterprises, a publicly traded company headquartered in Davenport, Iowa, and one of the largest newspaper chains in the U.S.

• Japan’s government approved a $490 billion package to support recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic after recent economic struggles, including cash payments to most families and some smaller companies.
   
• Turkey’s currency crisis is driving up the cost of food, medicine and other essentials for average Turks, and poses a threat to the country’s banks and large companies if the lira’s slide isn’t arrested, economists said.
   
• U.S. intelligence agencies learned this spring that China was secretly building what they suspected was a military facility at a port in the United Arab Emirates, one of the U.S.’s closest Mideast allies, according to people familiar with the matter.
   
• Global supply-chain woes are beginning to recede, but shipping, manufacturing and retail executives say that they don’t expect a return to more-normal operations until next year and that cargo will continue to be delayed if Covid-19 outbreaks disrupt key distribution hubs.
   
• Nearly 200 countries at the U.N. climate conference this month agreed to curb their use of fossil fuels to address global warming. For businesses, the shift—and climate change itself—raises the risk that trillions of dollars of assets will become worthless.

Rosa Maguina plowed a big chunk of her savings into cryptocurrency early this year, joining other individual investors trying to strike while bitcoin was hot. The funds vanished after a hacker hijacked her phone number for just two hours.

Ms. Maguina, who runs an events logistics business with her husband in Doral, Fla., said she was about to go to sleep on July 5 when she noticed her phone lost its signal. By the time Ms. Maguina’s service was restored, she said, an unauthorized user had changed her passwords for trading platforms Binance and Coinbase and initiated transactions that emptied her accounts of crypto valued at around $80,000 at the time.

“It was like someone coming through the window or backdoor into your house,” Ms. Maguina said. “You feel that there’s nothing you can do.”

Criminals have a history of stealing money from wealthy or well-known crypto investors through SIM swaps, or switching a phone number from one device’s subscriber identity module to another. But the crypto boom among mom-and-pop investors has led hackers to increasingly circle targets like Ms. Maguina, according to cybersecurity experts, lawyers and law-enforcement officials.

Deutsche Bank AG said it picked Alexander Wynaendts, an outsider with experience in insurance and banking, to be its next chairman.

Mr. Wynaendts, a 61-year-old Dutchman, was the chief executive officer of Dutch insurer Aegon NV for 12 years through 2020. 

He will succeed longtime chairman Paul Achleitner, who has led the company’s supervisory board for nearly decade. Mr. Achleitner’s tenure as chairman has coincided with a long period of poor performance, strategic uncertainty and management upheaval at the bank. Mr. Achleitner has overseen four different chief executives.

Deutsche Bank shares have fallen more than 50% since Mr. Achleitner became chairman, weighed down by massive regulatory fines and repeated capital raisings. The bank remains under the watchful eye of regulators in the U.S. for persistent shortcomings in anti-money-laundering controls, The Wall Street Journal reported in May.

• Activision Blizzard Inc. Chief Executive Bobby Kotick has told senior managers he would consider leaving the company if he can’t quickly fix the culture problems at the videogame giant, according to people familiar with his comments.

Austria became the first European country to introduce a general vaccination mandate and return to a nationwide lockdown in reaction to a rapid rise in Covid-19 infections and hospitalizations despite mass immunization.

The decision comes as a warning sign to other Western countries, including the U.S., that had hoped to put the pandemic behind them thanks to successful vaccination campaigns.

All residents of Austria will need to take a Covid-19 vaccine as of Feb. 1 to be able to participate in most aspects of public life including working outside the home, the government said Friday.

• Booster shots from Pfizer Inc. and partner BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc. will be available to all adults after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed the extra doses for people at least six months after their second shot.

Will Covid-19 deliver a permanent boost to the cargo business? Financial markets seem less optimistic than shipping and aviation companies.

This week’s Dubai Airshow gave a snapshot of the current state of aircraft manufacturing. Boeing struck a high-profile deal with India’s Akasa Air for 72 737 MAX jets, a further sign of confidence in the once-troubled model, and Airbus accumulated hundreds of orders and commitments. However, wide-body planes sold poorly, supporting fears that the pandemic has permanently reduced demand for business travel.

To keep manufacturing rates high, plane makers are pinning their hopes on a lone pandemic bright spot: freighters. Airbus this month said it expects the freighter market to require 890 jets over the next 20 years, which is 40 more than it expected in 2019.

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