Good morning. The Securities and Exchange Commission said it has awarded nearly $279 million to a whistleblower who helped the regulator and other agencies bring enforcement actions, its largest award ever, reports Risk & Compliance Journal's Mengqi Sun. 

The securities market regulator announced the award Friday but didn’t name the case it is connected to or identify the tipster, in keeping with its policy of not divulging this information to the public.

• Previous record: Friday’s award topped the previous record, a $114 million whistleblower award the SEC issued to an individual in October 2020.
   
• Why so big? Although the SEC said it already had opened a probe of the unnamed company and its staff were aware of potential misconduct there, the agency credited the whistleblower’s information with expanding its probe and for providing ongoing assistance through written submissions and interviews.
   
• Potential impact: “This award will have a massive chilling effect on Wall Street frauds,” said whistleblower attorney Stephen M. Kohn, who isn’t involved in the case.

The Risk & Compliance Forum on May 9 will feature speakers including Glenn Leon, chief of the fraud section at the Justice Department, Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement Matthew Axelrod, Elizabeth Atlee, chief ethics & compliance officer at CBRE and Sidney Majalya, chief risk officer at Binance.US. You can register here.

NY attorney general seeks broader authority to police crypto.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is proposing new legislation that would give her office more authority to regulate the increasingly tumultuous cryptocurrency industry.

The bill would give the attorney general’s office broader enforcement authority over crypto firms that have operations in the state, while codifying the New York State Department of Financial Services’ authority to license participants in the sector and oversee the state’s digital asset licensing regime.

U.S. again extends sanctions carve-out for Russia energy sales.

The U.S. has again extended a sanctions carve-out that permits financial institutions to process transactions related to Russian energy sales.

New guidelines. The Treasury Department will allow energy-related transactions involving certain Russian banks to continue until Nov. 1, 2023, the Office of Foreign Asset Control said Friday in a formal notice. The carve-out had been slated to expire on May 16.

• The Justice Department said Friday that it has settled its antitrust challenge to the Swedish lockmaker Assa Abloy’s planned acquisition involving a U.S. rival, putting the $4.3 billion deal on track for completion.|
   
• Joseph Sullivan, the former chief security officer at Uber Technologies, was sentenced to three years’ probation by a federal court in San Francisco, over criminal obstruction charges relating to a 2016 data breach at the ride-hailing giant.
   
• The South Korean prosecutor leading the investigation into crypto entrepreneur Do Kwon said he believes extraditing him to his native country would be the best way to bring justice to victims of the TerraUSD cryptocurrency crash.
   
• With the Securities and Exchange Commission preparing an enforcement action that threatens much of its business, crypto exchange Coinbase is trying a novel defense. It says regulators bear some responsibility for letting the company go public in the first place.
   
• U.S. sanctions are spurring Chinese tech companies to accelerate research to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence without relying on the latest American chips.
   
• Finance executives are bracing for higher costs and unintended consequences from new federal disclosure requirements on share repurchases, the latest in a series of moves by lawmakers and regulators to curb the popularity of stock buybacks.

Japan’s Kishida visits South Korea as two U.S. allies confront ‘grave’ security issues.

The leaders of South Korea and Japan met Sunday, as the two U.S. allies continue rekindling cooperation to counter China’s regional aggression and North Korea’s nuclear threat.

Improved relations sought. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida arrived in Seoul for a two-day trip, the first visit to South Korea by a Japanese leader since 2018. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol traveled to Tokyo in March for the first formal summit between the two countries in more than a decade.

Robust hiring in April shows U.S. job market remains hot in cooling economy.

Americans landed jobs and their wages increased in April, showing the labor market remained resilient amid banking turmoil, rising interest rates and high inflation.

Economic stressors. Over the past year, inflation hit historic highs, economic growth slowed, the Federal Reserve rapidly raised interest rates and stress emerged in the banking sector. Many economists anticipated that those challenges would trigger the labor market to crack. So far, it hasn’t.

• Taiwan has begun preparing for a sharp rise in economic tension with China, stepping up efforts to encourage businesses to look for investments in the U.S. and other countries.

Google launches cybersecurity certificates for entry-level workers.

Google is expanding its Career Certificates program with a course in cybersecurity designed to teach newcomers to the field the basic skills necessary to work as an analyst.

Phil Venables, chief information security officer at Google Cloud, said the course will teach students foundational concepts to work in a security-operations center, including identifying risks and vulnerabilities, using standard security tools and working with coding languages such as Python.

• Top Democrats and Republicans are racing to try to find a politically acceptable way to raise the nation’s borrowing limit in the coming weeks.
   
• Eight people were killed in Brownsville, Texas, on Sunday when a vehicle plowed into a group at a bus stop near a homeless shelter currently housing migrants.
   
• A recent campaign to restrict overseas access to China-based data sources was partly triggered by a drumbeat of U.S. think tank reports on sensitive Chinese practices that alarmed Beijing, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
   
• The federal government has ignited a green-energy investment spree that’s expected to reach $3 trillion over the next decade. The road to spending that money, though, is increasingly hitting speed bumps.
   
• Some U.S. and European officials said they believe that Ukraine’s planned spring offensive could pave the way for negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow by the end of the year, and that China could help bring Russia to the table.
   
• The World Health Organization declared an end to the Covid-19 emergency, signaling that one of the most deadly and economically devastating pandemics in modern history is receding as the disease that caused it becomes a routine illness.