Good morning. Swiss prosecutors charged a former top executive at commodity trading firm Trafigura with facilitating payment of millions of dollars’ worth of bribes to land the energy trader preferential treatment in African oil producer Angola.

• The charges: Mike Wainwright helped to funnel part of the payments to an Angolan official, Swiss prosecutors said in an indictment at the Federal Criminal Court on Wednesday. These included more than 4.3 million euros, equivalent to $4.6 million, to a bank account in Geneva between 2009 and 2011, and $604,000 in cash payments in Angola.
   
• Former Angolan official also charged: Prosecutors also charged the former Angolan official alleged to have received the payments—a middleman for Trafigura—and the company itself for lax controls that prosecutors said made bribery possible. Trafigura earned about $144 million in profits from shipping contracts it gained in return for the payments, the prosecutors said.
   
• Opaque market: The commodity industry is dominated by a small group of mostly private companies, of which Trafigura is one of the biggest. The companies compete fiercely to do business in resource-rich countries susceptible to corruption. Authorities in the U.S., Switzerland and elsewhere have alleged in a series of indictments in recent years that different firms resorted to corruption to get one up over their rivals.
   
• What this means for Trafigura: The case is a second black eye for Trafigura this year. In February, the company said it had lost almost $600 million due to what it said was a fraud in the nickel market.

U.K. makes arrest in probe into jet-engine parts scandal.

The U.K. has launched a criminal investigation into alleged fraud at an aircraft-parts supplier suspected of selling thousands of jet-engine components with fake safety certificates that have been found in dozens of jets, including some operated by major U.S. airlines.

The Serious Fraud Office said Wednesday it had raided an address and arrested an individual as part of its probe into AOG Technics. The London-based company’s lone director and shareholder is Jose Zamora Yrala.

Founder of crypto platform Bitzlato pleads guilty to unlicensed money transmitting.

The founder of crypto exchange Bitzlato pleaded guilty Wednesday to operating a money-transmitting business that transported and transmitted illicit funds.

U.S. authorities arrested Anatoly Legkodymov, also the firm’s majority owner, in January. Prosecutors say that Bitzlato, which is based in Hong Kong but operates globally, exchanged more than $700 million in cryptocurrency with Hydra Market, a darknet marketplace that was the world’s largest before it was shut down in April 2022.

• Brokerages SoFi Securities, Public and M1 Finance misled millions of investors about their securities-lending programs, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
   
• Facebook and Instagram recommend sexual content to underage users and promote minors’ accounts to apparent child predators, the state of New Mexico alleges in a lawsuit against parent company Meta Platforms and its CEO.
   
• A ban on noncompete agreements could soon be coming to New York—potentially with a carve-out for higher earners.
   
• Regulators are probing Comerica after a botched technology upgrade left the bank’s wealth-management unit short millions of dollars.
   
• Late Stage Management consultant Raymond John Pirrello faces criminal fraud charges over his role in pitching pre-IPO shares to investors in what the Justice Department described as an interstate conspiracy that brought in about $528 million and diverted $88.6 million to Pirrello and unnamed co-conspirators.
   
• An expanding number of lawsuits are targeting the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy, alleging that exposure to the pain reliever in the womb raises a child’s risk for autism or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
   
• The European Union passed a strict privacy law in 2018 that influenced the way companies handled personal data. Coming rules on AI might have a similar effect in shaping corporate use of AI systems, the head of privacy at tax software maker Intuit told WSJ Pro Cybersecurity. 

Bitcoin mining used more water than New York City last year.

A water hog is lurking in your crypto wallet. 

Bitcoin-mining operations slurp up billions of gallons of water globally each year. Estimates vary, but the annual footprint is projected to surpass 591 billion gallons of water this year, according to an article published last week in the peer-reviewed journal Cell Reports Sustainability.

For comparison, New York City residents and businesses consumed 403 billion gallons in 2022, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

How is China’s economy doing? Not nearly as well as China says it is.

This year was supposed to be a turning point for China, a time when the economy headed toward recovery. It turned out to be the opposite.

It’s hard to remember now, but at the start of 2023, the country’s prospects couldn’t have been brighter—in part because of the terrible human price leaders had elected to pay for getting back to growth by ripping off the Band-Aid of its zero-Covid policy toward the end of 2022.

Six months later, everybody was scrambling to understand why their predictions had gone awry.

• European Union leaders plan to warn Chinese leader Xi Jinping that the bloc is prepared to impose new sanctions and trade penalties on his nation unless it acts to address economic frictions and rein in exports to Russia of goods used for its war in Ukraine, EU officials said before a summit in Beijing Thursday.
   
• In what is becoming a holiday-season tradition, Covid-19 cases are rising once again in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
   
• European natural-gas prices are expected to decline further next year amid lackluster demand and above-average inventories despite a cold start to the winter across the continent, according to some analysts.
   
• A containership collided with a floating bridge in the eastern lane of the Suez Canal on Wednesday but the flow of ships across the waterway won’t be interrupted, the Suez Canal Authority said.

• Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he won’t run for re-election and would exit Congress at the end of the year.
   
• President Biden warned that failure by Congress to pass tens of billions of dollars in new aid for Ukraine could ultimately lead the U.S. to direct conflict with Russia.
   
• Israel said it has killed about half of Hamas’s midlevel commanders in Gaza and is pressing on the suspected hiding place of the group’s leader.
   
• Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen began a two-day visit to Mexico on Wednesday with a renewed call to strengthen the global fight against synthetic opioid fentanyl.
   
• U.S. prosecutors accused four Russian military personnel of abducting and torturing an American in Ukraine.

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