Good morning.  A court filing by federal prosecutors earlier this month lays out details about a series of alleged missteps that led Ericsson SA to agree to pay $207 million in fines. Prosecutors highlighted in particular how failures by the Swedish telecommunication company’s outside lawyers contributed to their decision to seek the new penalties.

The Justice Department in early March said it would take the rare step of tearing up a $1 billion settlement that Ericsson entered into in 2019 to resolve bribery offenses in China, Djibouti and three other countries.

In a filing explaining how Ericsson allegedly breached the agreement, prosecutors attributed specific missteps by Ericsson’s outside legal counsel, including lawyers at firms Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Freeh Sporkin & Sullivan.

• What happened: In one instance described by prosecutors, senior executives at Ericsson told Simpson Thacher to report findings from a continuing internal investigation into bribery allegations in Iraq. Ericsson’s investigators had turned up evidence of corrupt payments and other serious misconduct by its employees and business partners, but when Simpson Thacher called prosecutors in November 2019, two weeks before Ericsson’s settlement was finalized, what the law firm relayed about the probe was insufficient, leaving them at least partly in the dark, according to the Justice Department’s filing.
   
• A unique response: Legal experts say they believe the case is the first in which prosecutors have cited disclosure failures as the basis for declaring a breach of a deferred prosecution agreement, under which prosecutors agree to forgo criminal charges if a company completes a probationary period.

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TikTok ramps up lobbying in Washington to try to avoid U.S. ban

The Biden administration is demanding that TikTok’s Chinese owners sell their stakes in the video-sharing app or face a possible U.S. ban of the app, according to people familiar with the matter. Lobbyists for Oracle Corp. have been racing to build Capitol Hill support for TikTok’s proposed partnership with the Austin-based tech company as a solution to the U.S. government’s security concerns.

Their roughly 90-person lobbying roster adds considerable firepower to TikTok’s growing Washington presence. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance Ltd., has spent more each year since it began lobbying in 2019, for a total of $13.5 million through the end of last year, lobbying records show. 

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will go to Capitol Hill next week to testify before a Congressional committee.

• Related: New Zealand Bans TikTok From Parliamentary Devices
   

Cellphone companies must block obvious scam texts, FCC says

U.S. regulators say scam texts have gotten out of control, and it is time for cellphone companies to do more to stop them.

Under new rules adopted Thursday by the Federal Communications Commission, mobile-service providers have to block robotext messages the agency says are highly likely to be illegal. That includes texts from numbers that shouldn’t be sending messages, such as unused and invalid numbers, as well as those that government agencies identify as not for texting.

• When Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed, both had high marks from ratings firms. Though Wall Street and regulators have also often struggled to predict meltdowns, the collapses marked the latest blemish for the firms’ track records for warning of financial distress.

Wave of stealthy China cyberattacks hits U.S., private networks

State-sponsored hackers from China have developed techniques that evade common cybersecurity tools and enable them to burrow into government and business networks and spy on victims for years without detection, researchers with Alphabet Inc.’s Google found.

The attacks routinely exploit previously undiscovered flaws and represent a new level of ingenuity and sophistication from China, said Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Google's Mandiant division.

PG&E appoints CFO as utility aims to reduce wildfire risk

PG&E Corp. hired the former finance chief at Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. to oversee its finances as the utility focuses on its capital-spending plan in part aimed at reducing wildfire risk.

The company has been on the hunt for alternative ways to fund its capital-spending plan, which proposes roughly $50 billion in investments between 2022 and 2026.

The plan is central to the company’s efforts to significantly lower the risk of PG&E’s power lines sparking wildfires and improve safety.

• Banking-sector turmoil raises the odds that the U.S. economy, already widely seen as prone to recession, might actually tip into one. The economic outlook now hangs on two factors: private- sector confidence and Federal Reserve interest-rate policies.
   
• China’s foreign minister on Thursday spoke by telephone with his Ukrainian counterpart as Beijing continues to signal its desire to play a part in ending that country’s war with Russia.
   
• The European Central Bank raised interest rates by a half-percentage point while promising emergency support for eurozone banks if needed, showing the policy makers’ balancing act as they seek to combat high inflation without aggravating strains in the financial system.
   
• Japan and South Korea pledged to deepen military and economic ties at their leaders’ first formal summit since 2011, a long-delayed move to repair relations.

• Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse and the threat of other troubled banks are “a wake-up call” to financial markets and companies that the Fed’s rate hikes have consequences. It may be a blessing in the disguise of a bank run. 
   
• Tech executives discussed the implications of the SVB collapse in a panel discussion at a CIO Network event.
   
• It's no longer enough that sustainability chiefs know the technical stuff. They also need to be influencers and transformation leads for their companies. 
   
• Retailers including Walmart and Whole Foods are pushing for lower prices from suppliers, leveraging their buying power now that supply-chain constraints have eased. 
   
• Stubborn inflation, particularly in building costs, continues to challenge businesses that want to use insurance to prepare for the next disaster.

• The U.S. and Taiwan moved a step closer toward a bilateral trade and investment initiative.
   
• Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. has created a tool to predict the structure of hundreds of millions of proteins using artificial intelligence, which could help deepen scientists’ understanding of biology, and perhaps speed the discovery of new drugs.
   
• The European Union, fresh from targeting U.S. and Chinese green-tech subsidies, Thursday set out steps to make its industries more globally competitive in emerging environmental sectors.
   
• French drugmaker Sanofi SA said it would cut the price of some of its insulin products by as much as 78% in the U.S.