Leon Black, the Wall Street billionaire who was the main client of financial bastard Jeffrey Epstein for the last decade of his life, is stepping down as chief executive of Apollo Global Management, several months ahead of schedule.
Black will also relinquish the presidency of the private equity firm, which he helped found about three decades ago, according to a statement released by the firm on Monday. Jay Clayton, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission who recently joined the company as an independent director, will take over as chairman.
In a statement, Black, 69, said he decided to leave now to focus on his family and the health of him and his wife. In January, the company had said he would step down as chief executive before turning 70 in July, while retaining the position of president.
Apollo had previously announced that Marc Rowan, another co-founder of Apollo, would succeed Mr. Black as chief executive after a report was released by an outside law firm detailing how Mr. Black paid Mr. Epstein, the criminal registered sex worker who committed suicide in August 2019 while facing federal sex trafficking charges, $ 158 million in fees to Epstein and lent him nearly $ 30 million. The review found no irregularities on the part of Black, who planned to remain chairman.
This announcement, along with a series of changes in corporate governance, helped to calm many investors who were nervous about Black’s association with Epstein.
Apollo’s board, at the request of Mr. Black, hired a law firm in October to conduct the review after The New York Times reported that Mr. Black paid Mr. Epstein at least $ 75 million in fees. 2012 to 2017.
In the past few months, Apollo’s shares underperformed those of other large publicly traded companies.
On Monday, Tokyo prosecutors accused two Americans of helping Carlos Ghosn, the former Nissan chief, to skip bail in Tokyo, where he was awaiting trial on four counts of financial irregularities.
Japanese prosecutors said in an indictment that the two men, Michael Taylor, 60, a former Green Beret, and his son Peter Maxwell Taylor, 27, helped Ghosn’s efforts to escape the country, helping him escape to Turkey and then to Lebanon, where he was beyond the reach of Japanese law.
American officials arrested the men last May in Massachusetts. Earlier this month, they were extradited to Japan, where they were held in a Tokyo detention center while being questioned by prosecutors. A third man believed to have aided Ghosn’s escape remains at large.
Japanese officials have accused Michael Taylor of helping Ghosn travel by train to the western city of Osaka through security controls at a private jet terminal and then on a plane bound for Turkey. Once there, Mr. Ghosn was transferred to a flight to Beirut. Peter Taylor helped plan the escape, visiting Ghosn several times before the escape, officials say.
Ghosn and his son, Anthony Ghosn, paid more than $ 1.3 million to the Taylors and a company they controlled, US prosecutors said in lawsuits.
Ghosn’s case has raised international concerns about what some critics call the Japanese “hostage justice” system, which includes lengthy arrests of criminal suspects without charge. While in the United States, the Taylors fought a long legal battle to prevent their extradition, with their lawyers arguing that they could be subject to harsh conditions in a Japanese prison.
Last year, people trying to go to China encountered some of the most formidable barriers to entry in the world. To stop the coronavirus, China prohibits tourists and short-term business travelers and sets strict standards for all other foreigners, even those who have lived there for years.
The restrictions hampered the operations of many companies, separated families and affected the lives of thousands of international students, report Sui-Lee Wee and Keith Bradsher for The New York Times. Global companies say their ranks of foreign workers in the country have narrowed dramatically.
As variants of more lethal and infectious viruses have appeared in other countries in recent months, China has introduced new costly requirements.
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At the end of last year, it basically stopped allowing anyone to bring a spouse or child to the country.
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Since January, travelers arriving in Beijing from countries with severe outbreaks have had to undergo weekly anal smear tests during quarantine, with fecal material tested for traces of the virus.
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Last month, the government announced that travelers from more than two dozen countries would have to do two weeks of quarantine abroad before they were even allowed to fly to China. After disembarking, they were expected to spend two more weeks in a government-run quarantine facility.
Authorities consider travel restrictions to be critical to the success of containing the virus. Since the outbreak began, China has reported more than 101,000 cases of Covid. Although questions have been raised about the accuracy of the numbers, they are much lower than in the United States, where 29.8 million people tested positive for the virus.
China’s harsh restrictions, including its recent ban on dependents, have taken an emotional toll on some families who have been forced to live apart for months.
In February last year, Jessie Astbury Allen took her two daughters to England to await the outbreak that swept China, in the hope that they would be reunited with her husband in Shanghai at Easter. It was a plan she would regret.
“I knew we were doing the wrong thing, but it was too late,” she said, crying, as she described how it felt to land at London’s Heathrow airport.
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Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern announced plans on Sunday to combine into a $ 29 billion deal that would create the first rail network connecting the United States, Mexico and Canada. It is an effort to capitalize on the flow of trade that is expected to increase as the three countries recover from the pandemic. The boards of both companies unanimously approved the cash and stock deal, which is expected to close in mid-2022, subject to customary approvals.
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Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, said on Sunday that its net profit last year fell 44 percent to $ 49 billion as lower oil prices stemming from the pandemic decreased profits. The company’s chief executive, Amin H. Nasser, described 2020 in a statement accompanying earnings data as “one of the most challenging years in recent history”. But Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, said it would keep its promise to pay dividends of $ 75 billion. Almost all the payment will go to the Saudi government, which owns about 98% of the company.
For a decade before the pandemic, small investors accounted for about a tenth of commercial activity in the stock market. But in the past year, they have accounted for nearly a quarter, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs.
The speculative appetite of small investors may seem incompatible with an economy still recovering from a pandemic that has killed more than half a million Americans, decimated jobs and extinguished businesses and livelihoods. But one of the greatest tools put in place by the United States government to cushion the economic blow – stimulus payments – is also driving a huge increase in small traders’ investments, Matt Phillips reports to The New York Times.
Deutsche Bank analysts recently estimated that up to $ 170 billion from the last round of stimulus payments could flow into the stock market. They conducted a survey of retail merchants in which respondents said they planned to place about 40% of any payments they received – or $ 2 of every $ 5 – on the stock market. Traders aged 25 to 34 said they hoped to put half of their stimulus check in stocks.
“This could lead to a little more mania and speculation in the market,” said Patrick Fruzzetti, managing director and partner at Hightower Advisors, an investment firm. The “stimuli”, he said – using a popular online term for stimulus checks – will go to people’s trading accounts and “they will trade”.
In October 2015, a month after Volkswagen confessed to manipulating diesel cars to illegally hide high emissions, shocked company executives gathered in the tall, brick-clad office building covered with a giant VW logo that hangs over the main one. automaker’s factory in Wolfsburg, Germany.
The executives authorized the development of a collection of combined components that would serve as the basis for a series of electric models, including sedans, SUVs and vans, reports Jack Ewing for The New York Times. The standardized platform, called the Modular Electrification Toolbox, could also be used by other company brands, including Audi.
The platform will allow Volkswagen to exploit the great advantage it has over Tesla: size. With 665,000 employees and sales of 9.3 million vehicles last year, Volkswagen is the second largest automaker in the world, after Toyota. It can spread the cost of developing new technologies across millions of vehicles and lower Tesla’s price.
The commitment that Volkswagen made at the time is paying off now, as the company launches a line of vehicles developed from the beginning to run on batteries, with more interior space and more appeal than adaptations of gasoline vehicles.
In 2025, Volkswagen will be able to produce electric vehicles for less than it costs to build a gasoline or diesel car, analysts at UBS wrote in this month’s report. They warned that Tesla maintained significant leadership in battery technology and autonomous driving software.