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Many Black executives are urging major corporations to fight new Republican-led state voting laws  that they say would limit voting access, particularly for Black voters. Merck & Co CEO Kenneth Frazier, former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, and Mellody Hobson and John Rogers Jr., the co-chief executives of Ariel Investments, were among the 72 executives who signed an open letter published in a full-page New York Times ad Wednesday calling on corporations and business leaders to publicly oppose the new laws. Meanwhile, Delta CEO Ed Bastian issued his own statement Wednesday criticizing a similar law passed last month in Georgia. “Georgia is the leading edge of a movement all around this country to restrict voting access,” Mr. Frazier told CNBC on Wednesday. He described the new Georgia law “a prototype for a lot of bad laws.” The open letter from Black executives, which was titled “Memo to Corporate America: The Fierce Urgency is Now,” also criticized Georgia’s voting legislation, and that pending in other states.

 

Wall Street Journal

A Delaware judge has rejected a request by former McDonald’s chief executive Stephen Easterbrook to limit initial information sharing in a lawsuit in which the company claims he lied about having sexual relations with employees and seeks to claw back millions of dollars in severance pay he received in a separation agreement. Mr Easterbrook was also asked by Vice Chancellor Joseph Slights Jr. to provide the fast-food chain, which dismissed him in November 2019, with various documents and answers it has requested in an effort to prove that he breached his fiduciary duties by engaging in, and lying about, improper conduct. In objecting to the company’s information requests, Mr Easterbrook had argued that they are disproportionate and invade the privacy rights of third parties. However the judge said: “While I’m sympathetic to the fact that the discovery here seeks personally sensitive information, there is little doubt that the information requested is substantively relevant to McDonald’s claims here - claims which are, by themselves, personally sensitive.”

 

Chicago Tribune

Nina Barrett, owner of the Bookends and Beginnings bookshop in Evanston, Illinois has signed on as the named plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit accusing Amazon of orchestrating a price-fixing scheme with the nation’s leading book publishers - Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster - that makes it impossible for other retailers to beat their prices. The suit seeks to include all booksellers that bought books from the Big Five after March 25th 2017. It seeks damages and an injunction on the “anti-competitive” practice.

 

Chicago Sun-Times

The board of Icelandic generic drug company Alvogen has cleared executive chairman and chief executive officer Robert Wessman of inappropriate conduct after a former senior executive made a claim about abusive and bullying behaviour. Bloomberg says the company's investigation of the allegations underscores a growing focus on the conduct of corporate leaders in their dealings with colleagues. Alvogen’s board hired Boston-based law firm White & Case to conduct the review of the matter.

 

Bloomberg

French prosecutors are urging a Versailles court to fine Ikea €2m ($2.35m) for spying on its employees. They are also calling for a jail term for former CEO Jean-Louis Baillot  for his role in an alleged system to illegally monitor workers and job candidates. “What’s at stake here is the protection of our private lives against a threat, the threat of mass surveillance,” prosecutor Pamela Tabardel said on Tuesday. Baillot denies any role in the alleged scheme.

 

France 24

Financial Times

Auto maker Ford is to suspend production for two weeks in April at its truck plant in Dearborn, Mich., and take a week of downtime on the truck side of its Kansas City, Mo., assembly plant, as a global semiconductor shortage hits manufacturing. The company also plans to halt work temporarily and cancel planned overtime at several other factories in North America. A Ford spokeswoman said workers at the affected plants will be put on layoff status during the downtime, adding that in addition to unemployment benefits, Ford provides unionized workers with supplemental pay in keeping with the labor contract. General Motors has also had to close some plants in North America for several weeks.

 

Wall Street Journal

Office supplies retailer Staples says it will evaluate “all alternatives” to acquire ODP Corp, weeks after the Office Depot and OfficeMax owner rejected its rival’s proposal to purchase some of its assets. Staples, on its third attempt to buy Office Depot, said options may include ODP’s retail and consumer facing business, its operations in Canada and certain other assets. The company said it has notified U.S. and Canadian authorities about its continuing interest in Office Depot and said it continues to work “diligently” with the Federal Trade Commission and the Canadian Competition Bureau to obtain approvals from both agencies.

 

Sun-Sentinel

Reuters

Neiman Marcus has refinanced the high-interest debt it exited bankruptcy with last year, lowering its annual interest payments by $30m to about $80m. The company sold $1.1bn in senior secured notes paying 7.125% interest that are due in 2026 vs. a complicated series of debt that was due in 2025. Moody’s gave the debt a high-risk rating but with a stable outlook for now. Neiman also has a $900m credit line with no borrowings and more than $200m in cash that includes money left over from the new debt offering and the sale of a couple of distribution centers in Texas.

 

Dallas Morning News

Boston Dynamics has introduced Stretch, a robot that is solely devoted to moving boxes. Michael Perry, vice president of business development for Boston Dynamics, said the robot was built on the basis of requests received from clients around the world. “We heard pretty much universally across warehousing that truck unloading is one of the most physically difficult and unpleasant jobs ... And that’s where Stretch comes into play,” Perry said.

 

Reuters

Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), says prospects for global growth have improved since January, but uneven progress in fighting the coronavirus pandemic could jeopardise the economic gains. Noting that the IMF’s updated economic forecast will next week show the global economy growing at a faster pace than the 5.5% gain projected at the start of the year, she said this has been driven by a $1.9trn U.S. rescue package and rising confidence from increased vaccinations in many advanced economies. However, Ms Georgieva warned that economic prospects are "diverging dangerously" and called on major central banks to “carefully communicate their policy plans to prevent excess financial volatility at home and abroad."

 

CNBC	Daily Mail

Black employees held a lower share of top U.S. financial services jobs in 2018 than they did more than a decade earlier, according to new research by the Financial Times.

 

Financial Times

The FT says that since Thomas Gottstein became Credit Suisse CEO a year ago, the bank has lurched from one risk management crisis to another: an unlucky coincidence or symptomatic?

 

Financial Times

Many potential school shooters exhibit warning signs that can be acted on ahead of time, giving educators, families and fellow students a chance to avert the next tragedy, according to a U.S. Secret Service report issued on Tuesday. The study analyzed 100 students responsible for plotting 67 attacks nationwide from 2006-18 in K-12 schools; all were serious planned attacks, and the plotters took at least some steps toward carrying them out or schools had faced a substantial level of risk. "In every case, tragedy was averted by members of the community coming forward when they observed behaviors that elicited concern," the report said, noting that fellow students were often the best-placed to identify the warnings. Among such harbingers was displaying an interest in Adolf Hitler, Nazism and white supremacy, the report said. Plotters also typically had access to weapons at home, either through unfettered access or stealing them from their parents.

 

Education Week

U.S. News & World Report