 |
| BREAKING NEWS ALERT |
| September 10, 2015 |
|
Law enforcement authorities in Lake County say the investigation into last week's shooting death of a Fox Lake police officer remains as active as ever, as they criticized the county coroner for releasing information they said "puts the entire case at risk."
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Breaking news | Weather | Mobile site | Text alerts | Member Center | Manage subscriptions |
|
| BREAKING NEWS ALERT |
| September 10, 2015 |
|
Illinois Republican state Sen. Darin LaHood has won a special election to replace disgraced former U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock, defeating high school teacher Rob Mellon.
| ||||||
| ||||||
|
| BREAKING NEWS ALERT |
| September 10, 2015 |
|
After years of protests by community activists demanding access to urgent medical care,University of Chicago Medicine and Sinai Health System on Thursday announced a $40 million joint project to open an adult trauma center on the South Side.
|
Display problems? View this newsletter in your browser.
| ||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||
|
 | |||
|
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2015TODAY'S TOP HEADLINES | ||||||||||||||||||||
M & A Telenor and TeliaSonera Call Off Merger of Danish OperationsINVESTMENT BANKING Breakingviews: Change to Bank Rules Could Spur Political Fight in a CrisisOFFERINGS Triple Listings for Japan Post Behemoths Seek to Raise $11.5 BillionVENTURE CAPITAL A Venezuelan in Silicon Valley Finds a Niche in FinanceLEGAL/REGULATORY Evans Bank Settles New York 'Redlining' Lawsuit | ||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||
BY AMIE TSANG
AVON IN TALKS TO SELL A STAKE Avon Products is discussing selling a stake in itself and bringing in a partner to help turn the company around, Michael J. de la Merced reports in DealBook. The cosmetics maker considered bringing in a private equity firm for what is known on Wall Street as a private investment in public equity, or PIPE, - essentially a negotiated stake sale by a publicly traded company. It has also explored other options. Bids are expected within the next few weeks.
The company fended off an unwanted takeover bid by a cosmetics rival, Coty, three years ago, but has failed to reverse nearly five years of falling sales and almost four years of losses. Its share price has tumbled nearly 87 percent during the last five years. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the discussions, noted that Avon's business of selling door-to-door had struggled to keep up withchanging shopper habits and it had been slow to increase sales via the Internet. The company's shares closed on Thursday at $4.10, valuing it at just under $2 billion. Avon still had about $696.9 million in cash and short-term investments as of June 30. But it carries about $2.2 billion in long-term debt and its bonds are rated at junk level with a negative outlook by Moody's.
JUSTICE DEPT. PROMISE HARD TO KEEP The Justice Department gave a directive this week essentially saying, "Banks don't break the law, bankers do." But recent investigations suggest that the challenges that prosecutors face cannot be easily solved by new rules, Ben Protess and Matt Apuzzo write in DealBook.
Prosecutors today would probably still struggle to indict Angelo Mozilo, the founder of Countrywide Financial, who embodied the risk-taking in subprime mortgages before the financial crisis. The same goes for Lehman Brothers executives who, like Mr. Mozilo, never faced criminal charges. Prosecutors conducted investigations of those executives along the lines of the new guidelines, but said that they struggled to prove wrongdoing. "Updated guidelines are not a panacea," said David A. O'Neil, a defense lawyer and the former acting head of the Justice Department's criminal division in Washington. "White-collar cases are hard to prove, because they're very complex and if you don't have direct evidence of fraud, there's room for argument on both sides." Even when cases reach the courtrooms, they won't necessarily success. In several Wall Street cases that involved individual charges, juries and judges have spoiled the government's efforts to secure convictions and prison sentences. The difficulties in proving wrongdoing in an increasingly complex financial system are compounded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's allocating more resources to fighting terrorism than white-collage crime. Justice Department and F.B.I. officials acknowledge that the shift has come at the expense of white-collar cases. "I'm not trying to tell you that this means that tomorrow, all of a sudden, corporate heads are going to be rolling," Sally Q. Yates, the deputy attorney general and author of the new guidelines, said in an interview. "It's going to take some time for these changes to take effect. And we don't have any way of knowing what the actual impact will be in terms of cases that are brought."
DEWEY CASE PROSECUTOR APPEALS TO COMMON SENSELawyers for the three former Dewey & LeBoeuf executives on trial for cooking the books at the law firm spend three days picking holes in the prosecution's case. They pointed out the unreliability of email evidence and the paucity of testimony from accounting experts. On Thursday, the prosecution hit back, Matthew Goldstein reports in DealBook.
Peirce Moser, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, appealed to jurors to use their common sense. He reminded them that the men were on trial not over the collapse of Dewey in May 2012, but on charges that they engineered a scheme to mislead lenders and creditors by concealing the once-prominent law firm's ailing financial situation during the financial crisis. He said the defendants - Steven Davis, Stephen DiCarmine and Joel Sanders - treated Dewey like an A.T.M. and kept the firm, which once employed 1,200 lawyers, propped up so they could continue to pay themselves multimillion-dollar salaries. He even asked the jury to disregard testimony from witnesses that said they liked the defendants. Mr. DiCarmine, the law firm's former executive director, might be an "awesome" person, as one witness called him, but that did not matter if he broke the law, Mr. Moser said. His appeal was an effort to counter strong closing arguments made by the defendants' lawyers, who rested their case without calling any witnesses. The financial crisis period has yielded no headline-grabbing cases of accounting fraud, so it is easy to imagine that the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., thought he had struck gold when this case came along, James B. Stewart writes in the Common Sense column. One thing seems clear, Mr. Stewart writes. "Dewey & LeBoeuf is no Enron, and Mr. Davis, Mr. DiCarmine and Mr. Sanders are unlikely to emerge from the proceedings as household names synonymous with accounting fraud, no matter what the verdict." There's no doubt that the accountants, with the encouragement of their bosses, were doing their best to make Dewey's financial statements look as good as possible during a difficult period. But it still isn't entirely clear they believed they were committing crimes: several testified that at the time, they didn't believe they were doing anything wrong. Furthermore, none of the adjustments were on the same scale as the financial falsehoods that dominated previous scandals like Enron. Much of the testimony was about arcane, small-bore accounting issues. The prosecution may well add to a growing concern over what Justice Elena Kagan of the Supreme Court referred to as "overcriminalization and excessive punishment" when she discussed the overzealous prosecution of trivial matters. The Justice Departments initiative this week to begin holding corporate executives accountable was a response to widespread frustration that so few high-level executives have been prosecuted since the financial crisis even as their corporate employers have admitted wrongdoing and paid billions of dollars in fines. But that doesn't mean prosecutors should bring cases based largely on inference and flimsy evidence, Mr. Stewart writes.
ON THE AGENDA The University of Michigan releases September data on American consumer sentiment at 10 a.m. The August data on producer prices in the United States will be released at 8:30 a.m.
ADVISER ON CHINESE REVERSE MERGERS CHARGED The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Benjamin Wey, the founder of the Wall Street advisory firm New York Global Group, and charged him with of securities fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy and money laundering, Alexandra Stevenson reports in DealBook.
This was the second time he had been before a judge in a federal court this year. In June, he was found liable of sexual harassment and defamation. This time, he is accused of fraudulently taking Chinese companies public in the United States through reverse mergers - a process that involved buying the shell of an American company that had been publicly listed. Prosecutors say Mr. Wey used family members to help build secret ownership positions in the companies and manipulate their share prices. The tens of millions generated from this went into bank accounts of relatives in places like Hong Kong and Switzerland, prosecutors said. Later, the money would be repatriated to the United States. "Ben Wey fashioned himself a master of industry, but as alleged, he was merely a master of manipulation," Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement. David Siegal, Mr. Wey's lawyer, wrote in an email, "Mr. Wey denies the charges against him and looks forward to clearing his name." In a separate civil complaint filed on Thursday, the Securities and Exchange Commission accused Mr. Wey and Seref Dogan Erbek, his Swiss banker, of fraud.
Contact amie.tsang@nytimes.com
MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS »
Telenor and TeliaSonera Call Off Merger of Danish OperationsThe companies were unable to win approval from European antitrust authorities to combine their mobile telephone businesses.
G.E. to Seek Sale of Its Asset Management Arm The industrial conglomerate, already moving to shed its huge lending arm, is trying to become even smaller.
Fosun to Raise $1.5 Billion to Finance Acquisitions Fosun, the Chinese conglomerate, has been on a spending spree in the finance and insurance sectors in recent years, as it tries to become an insurance-focused investment group.
Siris Capital Makes Offer for Telecom Provider Premiere GlobalThe telecommunications provider Premiere Global Services has received a roughly $1 billion buyout offer from the private equity firm Siris Capital Group.
Nippon Life Agrees to Buy Mitsui Life Nippon Life Insurance said on Friday it has reached an agreement to buy its smaller rival Mitsui Life Insurance in what would be the first major realignment in Japan's life insurance market in 11 years.
INVESTMENT BANKING »
Breakingviews: A Change in Bank Rules Could Spur a Political Fight in a Crisis Financial regulators are throwing a bone to sprawling global banks by watering down plans for what happens if a lender goes bust. But it makes resolving crises a bit harder.
Blythe Masters Says U.S. Lags in Blockchain Use Blythe Masters, the former JPMorgan banker now leading a blockchain start-up, has cautioned that the United States is likely to lag behind other countries in using the technology underpinning Bitcoin to modernize their securities markets.
| ||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||
I.P.O./OFFERINGS »
Triple Listings for Japan Post Behemoths Seek to Raise $11.5 Billion The listings of Japan Post Holdings and its bank and insurance units will seek to raise a combined $11.5 billion - offerings the government hopes will bolster the stock market.
I.P.O. Market Continues Without Many Tech CompaniesTechnology companies' share of initial public offerings in the United States has fallen to a seven-year low.
VENTURE CAPITAL »
A Venezuelan in Silicon Valley Finds a Niche in Finance Meyer Malka of Ribbit Capital became a rising force in Silicon Valley by betting on financial technology when few others did.
Ellen Pao Ends Legal Battle, Citing Personal Resources After losing a high-profile sex discrimination case against her former employer, a venture capital firm, Ms. Pao has decided not to pursue an appeal.
DraftKings and FanDuel Prepare Their Next Wall Street Playbooks FanDuel and DraftKings, the two leading fantasy sports companies in North America, are both planning their next big financial moves – including whether to raise more money privately or do initial public offerings. DraftKings says it would even consider merging with FanDuel.
Uber's Chinese Rival Quietly Backs Its U.S. Rival Lyft Didi Kuaidi invested in Lyft alongside China's top Internet companies, Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings , The Wall Street Journal reports, citing people familiar with the situation.
Goldman Sachs Leads Funding Round for Online Thrift StoreGoldman Sachs has led an $81 million investment in online consignment store ThredUp, a move that highlights the financial firm's growing appetite for startups and a record investment in one of nearly a dozen such companies building online thrift shops.
LEGAL/REGULATORY »
Evans Bank Settles New York 'Redlining' Lawsuit Evans Bancorp reached an $825,000 settlement with Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman of New York State after it was accused by the state of discriminatory lending practices.
Citi Made $35 Million Ahead of Client's Deal, Former Trader Tells Court Senior Citigroup bankers put the interests of the United States bank ahead of clients, trading on insider information ahead of a major deal five years ago, one of its former foreign exchange traders told a London court on Wednesday.
| ||||||||||||||||||||
Nema komentara:
Objavi komentar