Category: x.straitsTimes

ALBANY – Alphabet’s Google violated US labour law by refusing to bargain with a union representing contract workers for YouTube Music, a federal agency has ruled. The National Labour Relations Board (NLRB) in a decision on Jan 3 rejected claims by Google, which owns YouTube, that it should not be considered the employer of workers provided by staffing firm Cognizant Technology Solutions. The group of YouTube Music content operation workers voted 41-0 in April 2023 to join the Alphabet Workers…

HONG KONG – ByteDance’s TikTok aims to grow the size of its US e-commerce business tenfold to as much as US$17.5 billion (S$23.3 billion) in 2024, according to people familiar with the matter, posing a bigger threat to Amazon.com. The 2024 merchandise volume goal for the US version of TikTok Shop – which melds online entertainment with impulse buying – was discussed in internal meetings in recent weeks and may still change depending on how the business goes, said the…

NEW YORK – Mr Nikesh Arora has repeatedly succeeded in winning big pay cheques. At Google, he became the firm’s highest-paid executive after getting a compensation package worth about US$51 million in 2012, and collected stock awards worth at least US$200 million by the time he left. Poached in 2014 by SoftBank Group’s Mr Masayoshi Son – and touted as the legendary investor’s likely successor – he amassed a US$135 million first-year compensation package that broke Japanese records and made…

NEW YORK – The US dollar is poised for its worst year since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic as Wall Street bets the Federal Reserve is set to lower interest-rates after safely reining in prices. After being whipsawed by false starts calling for the end of the Fed’s rate hiking regime, a Bloomberg gauge of the greenback is down nearly 3 per cent since January in the steepest annual drop for the US currency since 2020. In line with…

NEW YORK – Terraform Labs and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will head to trial in January, with Jump Trading swept up in the mix, after a judge ruled that the SEC’s fraud case against Terraform must be tried by a jury. US District Judge Jed S. Rakoff ruled in favour of the regulator on Dec 28, agreeing that Terraform is liable for selling unregistered securities, though he threw out allegations that it had made transactions in unregistered…

SINGAPORE – The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has imposed a $3.9 million civil penalty on Credit Suisse for its failure to prevent or detect misconduct by relationship managers (RMs) in its Singapore branch. Credit Suisse paid the penalty to the regulator immediately after it was imposed, and as part of the settlement, also separately compensated its affected clients, said MAS in a statement on Dec 28. The RMs had provided clients with inaccurate or incomplete post-trade disclosures, resulting in…

SEOUL – South Korea’s financial watchdog has recommended imposing a fine of at least 10 billion won (S$10.24 million) each on HSBC Holdings and BNP Paribas for so-called naked short selling, which is considered illegal in the country, according to two people familiar with the matter.  The nation’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) made the recommendation to the Securities and Futures Commission under regulator Financial Services Commission (FSC), said the people, who requested anonymity discussing private matters.  Naked short selling is…

  WASHINGTON – Temu, a popular low-cost online marketplace with ties to China, accused its rival Shein of using “mafia-style” methods to tamp down competition in a lawsuit filed on Dec 13, the latest volley in a heated turf war between two of the fastest-growing fashion retailers in the United States. In the filing, WhaleCo, which operates in the US as Temu, accused Shein of orchestrating a “multifaceted scheme” to slow its growth. It added that Shein had been trying…

SINGAPORE – A co-founder of Cake DeFi, which operates a Singapore-based online platform that offers access to decentralised finance services and products, has filed for the company to be wound up. A winding up notice in The Straits Times on Dec 7 showed that the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer Chua U-Zyn, represented by law firm Rajah & Tann Singapore, had filed an application with the High Court on Dec 1. ST has contacted the group for comments. This development…

  WASHINGTON – The US government concluded that short-seller Hindenburg Research’s allegations of corporate fraud against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani weren’t relevant before extending his conglomerate as much as US$553 million (S740 million) for a container terminal in Sri Lanka, a senior US official said. Allegations in a scathing report by US-based Hindenburg Research, which erased around US$100 billion from the Adani Group’s market value earlier this year, were front and centre as the International Development Finance Corp., or DFC,…

  SINGAPORE – GIC has bought two logistic facilities developed by Japanese real estate developer Daiwa House Industry for an undisclosed amount. The assets in Takatsuki city of Greater Osaka and Tosu city of Greater Fukuoka were completed in 2023 and 2021, said the Singapore sovereign wealth fund on Dec 4. “Both properties have modern building specifications that cater to a wide range of tenants,” GIC noted, adding that the assets are located in “regional logistics hubs with convenient transportation…

  SINGAPORE – Venture Corporation said on Nov 30 that its board of directors has established a share buyback plan to purchase up to 10 million ordinary shares of the company. This plan was authorised by the board on Nov 29, following the approval of Venture’s shareholders of the share purchase mandate at the annual general meeting on April 27, the company said in a bourse filing. Under the mandate, the company can buy up to about 14.5 million shares,…

  As China’s embattled shadow banking giant Zhongzhi Enterprise Group faces a criminal probe, lawyers and analysts are assessing the damage to investors. One estimate puts that at about US$56 billion (S$74.9 billion). More than three quarters of investor cash would be lost, with just 100 billion yuan (S$18.7 billion) being recovered from debt of as much as 460 billion yuan, according to one scenario outlined by Mr Ying Yue, a lawyer at Leaqual Law Firm in Shanghai. He expects…

NEW YORK – Gemini Trust and GIC-backed Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group (DCG) were sued by New York’s top law-enforcement officer for allegedly defrauding customers of US$1.1 billion (S$1.5 billion), escalating legal woes for two companies hit hard by last year’s plunge in cryptocurrency markets. The lawsuit filed on Thursday by New York Attorney General Letitia James accuses Gemini, which operated a crypto exchange, and DCG’s Genesis Global Capital unit of failing to disclose to investors the risks of a…

STOCKHOLM – Finnish telecom gear group Nokia on Thursday said it will cut up to 14,000 jobs in a new cost reduction effort after third-quarter sales fell by a fifth, taken down by sales of next-generation 5G equipment. Nokia and rival Ericsson have grappled with slowing demand for 5G equipment in markets such as the United States and the European Union, trying to offset some of the weakness with higher sales to India, a low-margin market. Nokia is targeting savings…

BENGALURU – Grand Centrex Limited (GCL) said on Wednesday that it will list in the US by merging with a blank-cheque firm in a deal that values the Singapore-based video game distributor at US$1.2 billion (S$1.65 billion). Special purpose acquisition companies (Spacs) have largely fallen out of favour following a bumper 2020, after they drew intense scrutiny from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. The poor stock performance of some companies that went public via a Spac merger have…