A former sales executive found guilty of involvement in a Unaoil Group-linked bribery scheme has appealed his conviction at a London court, Richard Vanderford reports for Risk & Compliance Journal.

Lawyers for Paul Bond, a former sales manager for Unaoil client SBM Offshore, argue the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office failed to disclose secret communications between agency officials and a private investigator for other individuals implicated in the wrongdoing.

Mr. Bond said the SFO “fundamentally failed to comply” with its duty to disclose evidence and stopped him from receiving a fair trial.

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Mr. Bond’s appeal, filed Monday, follows a ruling released earlier this month that overturned the conviction of Ziad Akle, a former Iraq territory manager for Unaoil who was one of Mr. Bond’s co-defendants.

Messrs. Akle and Bond were convicted of involvement in a corruption scheme involving Unaoil, a Monaco-based oil-services firm, but have argued the SFO improperly communicated with a private investigator for Ata Ahsani and his two sons, who together owned and controlled the company.

The private investigator, David Tinsley, communicated with senior SFO officials, including SFO head Lisa Osofsky.

“It went far beyond being merely inappropriate,” said Mr. Bond’s lawyer, Joseph Kotrie-Monson of Mary Monson Solicitors.

The U.S. Senate has confirmed Elizabeth Rosenberg as assistant secretary for terrorist financing at the Treasury Department, David Smagalla reports for Risk & Compliance Journal.

Ms. Rosenberg, whose nomination was confirmed late Saturday through a voice vote, currently serves as a counselor to the deputy Treasury secretary.

In her new role, Ms. Rosenberg will be responsible for formulating policy and outreach efforts at the Treasury’s Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes.

She previously worked as a director of the energy, economics and security program at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank, and as an adviser at the Treasury between 2009 and 2013.

In a June hearing, Ms. Rosenberg said she would help support the Treasury’s efforts in implementing new anti-money-laundering measures, including the building of a beneficial ownership database intended to make company ownership more transparent.

The U.S. extradited from Switzerland a Russian national with close ties to the Kremlin on charges that he participated in a scheme to hack and steal corporate earnings information about Tesla Inc., Roku Inc. and others, making tens of millions of dollars in illegal profits, prosecutors said Monday.

Vladislav Klyushin, arrested in Switzerland in March, was extradited to the U.S. on Saturday, the U.S. Justice Department said. Russia had contested his extradition with legal appeals that were rejected by Swiss courts.

Mr. Klyushin, 41 years old, was charged alongside four other Russian nationals who remain at large. The alleged hackers ran a Russian information technology company that purported to offer cybersecurity defense services to protect from nation-state hackers. Between 2018 and 2020, prosecutors said, the defendants broke into the computer networks of two vendors that public companies in the U.S. use to file reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Among the other four charged is Ivan Ermakov, a former member of Russia’s military intelligence agency, who was previously and separately charged with hacking crimes in 2018 in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Following a federal appeals court ruling reinstating the administration’s vaccination rules, the Labor Department said Friday night it would give employers until Feb. 9 to comply with the rule’s testing requirements and until Jan. 10 to comply with the rest of it. The original deadline announced by the administration was Jan. 4. 

• Securities and Exchange Commission member Elad Roisman plans to leave the market regulator by the end of January, giving Democrats a bigger majority at an agency pursuing an ambitious and sometimes politically divisive policy agenda.
   
• Global Infrastructure Management LLC has agreed to pay a $4.5 million penalty to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges involving fees and expenses it passed on to investors in at least two of its funds.
   
• A longtime Bundesbank official with a record as an inflation hawk has been appointed as Germany’s new central-bank governor, just as the European Central Bank moves away from its ultra-easy-money policies amid a surge in eurozone inflation.
   
• Sens. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) and Cynthia Lummis (R., Wyo.) sit on the powerful Senate Banking Committee and have been advocates for a light government touch toward the growing—and largely unchecked—cryptocurrency market. They also own cryptocurrency assets.
   
• The Biden administration on Monday raised fuel-efficiency standards for passenger cars and light-duty trucks, saying the new standards will reduce pollution and save consumers billions of dollars at the gas pump.
   
• Former President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against New York state Attorney General Letitia James on Monday, accusing her of having a political vendetta and abusing her office to launch investigations into him, his company and his family.
   
• The jury hearing the Ghislaine Maxwell trial began deliberating Monday after closing arguments, during which prosecutors portrayed the British socialite as a sophisticated predator and defense attorneys described her as a scapegoat for Jeffrey Epstein.

China’s expanding grip on data about the world’s cargo flows is sparking concern in Washington and among industry officials that Beijing could exploit its logistics information for commercial or strategic advantage.

Even cargo that never touches Chinese shores often still passes through Beijing’s globe-spanning logistics networks, including through sophisticated data systems that track shipments transiting ports located far from China. Control over the flow of goods and information about them gives Beijing privileged insight into world commerce and potentially the means to influence it, say cargo-industry officials.

With ports clogged globally and shortages plaguing many industries, shipping data has become an enormously valuable commodity.

• Kaisa Group Holdings Ltd., which in 2015 became one of the first Chinese developers to default abroad, said it had failed to make several payments on dollar bonds as planned, and is talking to creditors about a wide-ranging restructuring plan.
   
• An MIT professor’s academic collaboration in Shenzhen, China, led to criminal charges, but the university says such ties are ordinary practice.
   
• Glaciers across the Himalayas are melting at an extraordinary rate, with new research showing that the vast ice sheets there shrank 10 times faster in the past 40 years than during the previous seven centuries.
   
• The top bitcoin holders control a greater share of the cryptocurrency than the most affluent American households control in dollars, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
   
• Turkey’s financial strains worsened and the country’s business community went into revolt, signs that the currency crisis dogging the economy was heading into a dangerous new phase.

Exxon Mobil Corp. is looking to further reduce its debt, evaluating sustainability-linked financing instruments and preparing for potential new climate-related disclosure requirements, finance chief Kathryn Mikells said.

“We’re very focused on paying down debt further, [and] we’ll walk it down a bit more as we enter 2022,” Ms. Mikells said in her first interview since she joined the Irving, Texas-based oil-and-gas giant in August.

Exxon took on about $21 billion in new debt in 2020 in response to the sharp declines in its business caused by the pandemic. The company this year has paid down billions, which helped bring its net debt down to $51.83 billion as of Sept. 30, from $68.57 billion at the end of December, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, a data provider.

• The new chief information officer of Farmers Business Network Inc.—a company that runs an Amazon.com-like platform for farmers to buy supplies from seed to pesticides—plans to use data to sharpen the insights it offers farmers, as well as bring more of them to the site and keep them coming back.

• Oracle Corp. on Monday announced its largest deal ever, a roughly $28.3 billion purchase of electronic-medical-records company Cerner Corp. that vaults the business-software giant deeper into healthcare technology. The deal extends Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison’s longstanding willingness to buy his way into new markets.
   
• Chinese electric vehicles are speeding ahead in the country in 2021. Next they may want to make inroads overseas.

The Biden administration faces a looming decision on solar-energy tariffs that pits its goal of combating climate change against its ambition to wrestle high-tech manufacturing supply chains from China.

Early next year, U.S. taxes on imported solar panels are set to expire after a four-year run. Many climate activists and solar-energy users want the administration to scrap the tariffs, saying they make solar panels needlessly expensive.

U.S. solar manufacturers are petitioning to extend the tariffs for another four years. They say without them, the U.S. will effectively cede the business of making solar panels to Chinese companies, which already dominate key portions of the solar supply chain.

• Global supply-chain constraints continue to hurt Nike Inc.’s sales. The sneaker giant reported for a second consecutive quarter that its growth was stunted by a slowdown of production and transportation of its goods around the world.

Israel is set to bar its citizens from traveling to the U.S. and Canada because of the spread of the Omicron variant—as the World Economic Forum said it would postpone next month’s annual meeting in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos for the second successive year.

As Omicron continues to drive new restrictions on travel and social interactions, Israel’s government said it would place the U.S. and Canada along with eight other nations on a growing list of countries to which its citizens are barred from traveling.

Also placed on the list Monday were Italy, Germany, Belgium, Hungary, Morocco, Portugal, Turkey and Switzerland. The ban comes into effect Tuesday night, subject to a final approval by lawmakers expected on Tuesday morning. Most of Africa and other European countries are already on the Israeli no-fly list.

• The Omicron variant caused more than 70% of recent Covid-19 cases in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday, highlighting its substantial increase in infectiousness compared with earlier versions of the virus.
   
• Moderna Inc. said a third dose of its Covid-19 vaccine increased immune responses against the Omicron coronavirus variant compared with two doses in lab tests, signaling the shot could still offer protection despite the variant’s mutations.
   
• Covid-19, this time by way of its Omicron variant, has yet again upended life in New York City, with case counts surging ahead of the holidays.
   
• The hunt for Omicron is being hampered by local Covid-19 tracking efforts that have atrophied in much of the U.S. over the course of the pandemic.

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