Category: Corruption

Former Goldman Sachs Group banker Roger Ng won postponement of the start of his 10-year prison term for about three months until Aug 7, a federal judge ruled.

US District Judge Margo Brodie, who sentenced Ng in March for his role in the global 1MDB fraud, granted his request for a delay Monday without explanation.

Ng had been set to begin his prison term May 4. 

Defence lawyer Marc Agnifilo on Friday asked for the delay so Ng could spend more time with his wife and 10-year-old daughter, who had travelled to New York from Malaysia.

JPMorgan Chase, one of the biggest banks in the U.S., is buying the troubled First Republic Bank’s deposits, a “substantial amount of their assets and certain liabilities,” JPMorgan Chase said in a press release Monday.

The California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation announced early Monday that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp had taken possession of First Republic.

This marks the third time the U.S. government has taken control of a U.S. lender this year.

First Republic is the third — and biggest — U.S. bank to fail this year. In March, federal regulators swept in to protect customers of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Citing potential risk to the broader financial system, they took unprecedented action to insure all deposits at the two banks — even deposits that exceeded the FDIC’s $250,000 threshold for insurance.

First Republic Bank, on the brink of collapse in the weeks after the Silicon Valley Bank crisis, has finally fallen over, but with a relatively quick resolution into its next chapter: today the FDIC announced that it was being closed by the the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, that the FDIC was appointed as receiver, and that the FDIC would be selling the assets to JPMorgan.

Its assets and deposits total just over $330 billion together.

Specifically, “to protect depositors, the FDIC is entering into a purchase and assumption agreement with JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association, Columbus, Ohio, to assume all of the deposits and substantially all of the assets of First Republic Bank,” it said.

The FDIC also confirmed deposits will continue to be insured by the FDIC at an estimated cost of about $13 billion to its insurance fund.

All Britons will be called on to swear allegiance to King Charles III at his coronation, an oath hitherto reserved for British nobility.

It is a move that has upset anti-royalists.

Adidas is being sued by investors who claim the firm knew about Kanye West’s problematic behaviour years before it ended their partnership.

Investors allege Adidas failed to limit financial losses and take precautionary measures to minimise their exposure.

The sportswear giant ended its collaboration with the designer and rapper, who is known as Ye, last year following antisemitic comments.

In response, Adidas said: “We outright reject these unfounded claims.”

It added it “will take all necessary measures to vigorously defend ourselves against them”.

West is not party to the lawsuit. The rapper designed a line of hugely successful trainers under the Yeezy brand for Adidas.

Taipei, April 29 (CNA) The United States should engage with other democracies around the world to help Taiwan fend off threats from China, former U.S. national security adviser and outspoken China hawk John Bolton told a pro-Taiwan independence event in Taipei on Saturday.

“The U.S. response to help Taiwan against the Chinese threat has to be fully global,” Bolton said at the Global Taiwan National Affairs Symposium hosted by the World Taiwanese Congress, suggesting the establishment of “new structures of deterrence” against China.

Taiwan is “the center of gravity of the Chinese threat” to the world, said Bolton, who served as national security adviser under President Donald Trump from April 2018 to September 2019 and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006.

US President Joe Biden on Saturday, in a possible preview of a 2024 presidential campaign theme, attacked news outlets he said used “lies told for profit and power” to stir up hatred in the United States, as he coupled his remarks with pointed jokes about Fox News.

Speaking at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, Mr Biden referred to “truth buried by lies,” in an apparent reference to false conspiracy theories that his 2020 election win was the result of a massive voter fraud.

“Lies told for profit and power… lies of conspiracy and malice repeated over and over again designed to generate a cycle of anger and hate and even violence,” Mr Biden said.

That cycle, Mr Biden added, has emboldened local jurisdictions to ban books, and “the rule of law and our rights and freedoms to be stripped away”.

Zeroing in on what he characterised as “an extreme press,” Mr Biden at the same time joked that if he called Fox News “honest, fair and truthful, then I can be sued for defamation”.

DUBUQUE, Iowa (AP) — The surging Mississippi River was cresting in Iowa on Saturday as melting snow from Minnesota and Wisconsin continues to push up river levels, the National Weather Service said.

The weather service said the river was cresting between 23 and 24.3 feet (7 and 7.4 meters) in Dubuque, a city on the Mississippi about 200 miles (320 kilometers) east of Des Moines. The river was expected to crest at 21.9 feet (6.7 meters) in Bellevue, Iowa, on Saturday night.

The river is not expected to see many record crests in the next week, but the weather service said Saturday’s levels would come close to 1993 and 2001 records between 23.9 and 25.4 feet (7.3 and 7.7 meters) as the river moves down its 2,300-mile (3,700-kilometer) length before reaching the Gulf of Mexico.

The US central bank has said it failed to act with “sufficient force and urgency” in its oversight of Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed last month in the country’s biggest bank failure since 2008.

The conclusion is one of the main findings from the Federal Reserve’s investigation of the episode.

It sparked global fears about the state of the banking industry.

The review comes as another US lender, First Republic, remains in trouble.

US regulators are reported to be working on a potential rescue for the struggling firm, which was the 14th largest bank in the US at the end of last year.

The U.S. government has sounded the alarm about a critical software vulnerability found in genomics giant Illumina’s DNA sequencing devices, which hackers can exploit to modify or steal patients’ sensitive medical data.

In separate advisories released on Thursday, U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned that the security flaw — tracked as CVE-2023-1968 with the maximum vulnerability severity rating of 10 out of 10 — allows hackers to remotely access an affected device over the internet without needing a password. If exploited, the bug could allow hackers to compromise devices to produce incorrect or altered results, or none at all.

The FBI carried out a search on Thursday morning at the Potomac, Md., home of former FTX executive Ryan Salame, the New York Times reported, citing two people with knowledge of the matter said.

The FBI, Salame and his attorney did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Days before FTX filed for bankruptcy and Bankman-Fried stepped down as CEO, Salame informed the Securities Commission of the Bahamas that client assets held at FTX Digital Markets may have been transferred to Alameda, according to a court filing Wednesday by the agency.

He was one of the top political donors in the 2022 election cycle donating more than $23 million to Republican campaigns, according to OpenSecrets.

A United States judge has ordered a South African executive to pay more than US$3.4 billion (S$4.5 billion) in restitution and fines for a fraud scheme involving Bitcoin – the highest-ever civil monetary penalty in any US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) case.

Cornelius Johannes Steynberg, the founder and chief executive officer of Mirror Trading International Proprietary, committed fraud tied to retail foreign currency transactions, among other violations, the agency said in a statement that announced the order by US District Judge Lee Yeakel.

An unusually early heatwave in drought-hit Spain is set to peak on Thursday and Friday, with temperatures expected to break April records in the south of the country.

Experts have warned of the high risk of wildfires, and farmers have warned of the catastrophic effect it is having on their crops.

Since Monday, Spain has been enveloped by a mass of warm, dry air from North Africa that has driven up temperatures to “levels normally seen in summer and exceptionally high for this time of year,” said Spain’s state weather agency Aemet.

It’s been six weeks since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank threatened to kick off a nationwide bank run. Now, U.S. regulators are due to issue their postmortem reports.

The Federal Reserve plans to release a report Friday on whether there were lapses in its oversight of Silicon Valley Bank that may have contributed to the bank’s failure.

Separately, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will also report Friday on how the regulator supervised New York-based Signature Bank, which failed days after the Silicon Valley lender.

The sudden implosion of two big regional banks rattled nerves throughout the financial system last month, forcing the federal government to take emergency steps to prevent a nationwide bank run.

BEIJING — Chinese leader Xi Jinping said Wednesday that Beijing will send an envoy to Ukraine to discuss a possible “political settlement” to Russia’s war with the country.

Beijing has previously avoided involvement in conflicts between other countries but appears to be trying to assert itself as a global diplomatic force after arranging talks between Saudi Arabia and Iran in March that led them to restore diplomatic relations after a seven-year break.

Xi told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a phone call that a Chinese envoy, a former Chinese ambassador to Russia, would visit Ukraine and “other countries” to discuss a possible political settlement, according to a government statement.

It made no mention of Russia or last year’s invasion of Ukraine and didn’t indicate whether the Chinese envoy might visit Moscow.

The Xi-Zelenskyy phone call was long anticipated after Beijing said it wanted to serve as a mediator in the war.