Corruption Ledger

US stocks tumbled Wednesday, as the banking sector saw renewed turmoil — but this time focused on Europe. US-listed shares of Credit Suisse plunged more than 20%, as Saudi backers ruled out further investment in the embattled lender.

Since regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank on Friday, investors have been concerned about another 2008-style financial crisis. On Tuesday, Moody’s cut its outlook for the entire US banking system. Meanwhile, the Labor Department reported wholesale prices posted a monthly decline of 0.1% in February, versus expectations for a 0.3% increase.

Privacy technology company OneTrust announced a series of changes to its board of directors and governance structure Wednesday, which it says positions the company for future growth. 

Under the revised governance arrangement, CEO Kabir Barday, CIPP/E, CIPP/US, CIPM, CIPT, FIP, will be joined by Coatue Management’s Thomas Laffont and Insight Partners’ Richard Wells. Current board members Alan Dabbiere, David Dabbiere and John Marshall will depart from the board, which now seeks “four new independent board members resulting in a majority-independent board of seven people,” according to the company’s press release. 

“Today, we have a clear path forward, strong investor demand, and the capital to support this last phase as a private company,” Barday said in comments provided to The Privacy Advisor. 

An American intelligence drone crashed after colliding with a Russian fighter over the Black Sea on Tuesday, the U.S. Air Force’s European headquarters said in a release.

The MQ-9 Reaper drone was flying a routine surveillance mission in international airspace when it crossed paths with two Su-27 fighters around 7 a.m. local time, according to U.S. Air Forces in Europe.

The Russian jets began antagonizing the unmanned aircraft, repeatedly dumping fuel on and buzzing in front of the much smaller Reaper, the Air Force said. One Su-27 drew close enough to hit the drone’s tail propeller, causing its remote operators to lose control of the plane.

March 14, 2023. Blick Online: Dark hours for Credit Suisse Bank Dark hours for the bank Credit Suisse, which continues to fight against the outflow of cash from its coffers. The trend has slowed but not reversed, the bank said in its annual report on Tuesday. The Zurich group suffered massive liquidity withdrawals last year, of 123.2 billion francs, including…

At the best of times this is not a good look for an institution in charge of £1.1 trillion worth of the world’s deposits and investments. In the middle of the worst jitters over bank safety for 15 years, it is doubly awkward. Coming weeks after both the chairman and chief executive had given the impression that the outflows had bottomed out, it is also deeply embarrassing. Markets gave their own unambiguous verdict. Credit default swaps on Credit Suisse debt hit a record, meaning it is more costly than ever for investors to insure against the group defaulting. The shares slumped by 4 per cent at one point yesterday, though they rallied on the back of a worldwide bounce in bank stocks.

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) will not affect China’s financial system but offers an important lesson for the country’s banking industry, the official Securities Times has said.

An SVB-style bank failure is unlikely to happen in China but the incident would have “important implications for the development of China’s small- and medium-sized lenders, and the stability of China’s financial system”, the media outlet said in an editorial on Wednesday.

SVB’s shutdown on Friday has roiled global markets, forced US President Joe Biden to rush out assurances that the financial system is safe and prompted emergency US measures giving banks access to more funding.

Responding after Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly said Ottawa is seeking “potential regime change in Russia” in comments to reporters last week, Moscow’s Ambassador to Canada Oleg Stepanov asked how Western nations would respond if the roles were reversed. “Quite perplexed to hear from Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly that her goal is ‘regime change’ in Russia. Is this how she instructs the Canadian Embassy in Moscow?” Stepanov said on Monday. “And by the way, what reaction would we expect if, for example, someone in Moscow had said that Russia’s goal is ‘regime change’ in Ottawa?”

A Southfield, Michigan-headquartered bank holding company has agreed to plead guilty to securities fraud for filing false securities statements relating to its 2017 initial public offering (IPO) and its 2018 and 2019 annual filings.

According to a signed plea agreement that will be publicly filed in court, Sterling Bancorp, Inc. (the Company) was the holding company for its wholly owned subsidiary, Sterling Bank and Trust F.S.B. (the Bank, or together with the Company, “Sterling”). Sterling – with branches located in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, and Southfield – completed an IPO in 2017, and the Company’s stock began trading on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker symbol “SBT.”

Senators on Tuesday called Russia’s downing of a U.S. drone “dangerous” and “reckless,” slamming Russian President Vladimir Putin but stopping short of calling for any specific actions.

A Russian fighter jet intercepted the drone over the Black Sea.

“This intercept was so dangerous and so brazen that the U.S. Air Force was forced to crash their drone into international waters. It is another reckless act by President Putin and his military, and I want to tell Mr. Putin, stop this behavior before you are the cause of an unintended escalation,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said from the chamber floor.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Germany’s response to the explosion on North Sea pipelines showed that the country remained “occupied” and unable to act independently decades after its surrender at the end of World War II.

Putin, interviewed on Russian television, also said European leaders had been browbeaten into losing their sense of sovereignty and independence.

Western countries, including Germany, have reacted cautiously to investigations into the blasts which hit Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipelines last year, saying they believe they were a deliberate act, but declining to say who they think was responsible.

Research shows most troops don’t begin transition classes until they are in their final months of military service.

Neither the US nor Russia gave any coordinates for the incident. The Americans argued the drone was “operating within international airspace” over the Black Sea. The Russians said the drone was inside the restricted airspace established for the special military operation, of which everyone was properly notified months ago. Unconfirmed reports in the Russian media put the drone’s location about 60 kilometers (37 miles) southwest of the Crimean port of Sevastopol.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday dismissed allegations that Ukrainians could be behind the blasts that damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea last year, and insisted the U.S. was to blame. Putin spoke after The New York Times, The Washington Post and German media published stories last week citing unidentified U.S. and other officials as saying there was evidence Ukraine, or at least Ukrainians, may have been responsible. The Ukrainian government has denied involvement.

Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper and German public broadcasters ARD and SWR reported that investigators believed five men and a woman used a yacht hired by a Ukrainian-owned company in Poland to carry out the attack. German federal prosecutors confirmed that a boat was searched in January but have not confirmed the reported findings.

Putin rejected the notion as “sheer nonsense.”

Syrian President Bashar Assad arrived in Moscow on Tuesday, where he is scheduled to meet top ally Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russia is a main backer of Assad and has a broad presence in Syria, where a 12-year uprising-turned-civil war has killed nearly half a million people and displaced half the country’s pre-war population. Moscow has played a pivotal role in fighting back armed opposition groups trying to topple Assad’s government through its military support, and has also aggressively backed Damascus against opponents at the United Nations.

The Kremlin confirmed Tuesday that Putin will meet with Assad on Wednesday — the anniversary of the conflict — in a statement carried by Russia’s state news agency Tass.

Ohio filed a lawsuit against railroad Norfolk Southern to make sure it pays for the cleanup and environmental damage caused by a fiery train derailment on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border last month, the state’s attorney general said Tuesday.

The federal lawsuit also seeks to force the company to pay for groundwater and soil monitoring in the years to come and economic losses in the village of East Palestine and surrounding areas, said Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost.

“The fallout from this highly preventable accident is going to reverberate throughout Ohio for many years to come,” Yost said.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency has proposed the first federal limit on so-called “forever chemicals” in the country’s drinking water, a move officials said will save lives.

The proposal announced will limit per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS.

The substances have been linked to a range of health issues, including low birth weight and kidney cancer. They do not naturally degrade in the environment and are expensive to remove from water.