The $680mn question of what the boss knew

Anil Ambani, the younger brother of Asia’s richest man, faces a $680 million legal test to answer one and only one question: Just what did he know about what his employees were doing on his behalf? Other Indian tycoons will take an abiding interest in his defense. The $680 million is the amount Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. ...

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A global anarchy revival could outdo the 1960s

India has exploded into protests against a citizenship law that explicitly discriminates against its 200 million-strong Muslim population. Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has responded with police firing on demonstrators and assaults on university campuses. The global wildfire of street protests, from Sudan to Chile, Lebanon to Hong Kong, has finally reached the country whose 1.3 billion population is mostly ...

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Unilever may be better off out of food business

Unilever NV has made a great deal of “instilling purpose” into its products, trying to flag up the social and environmental credentials of things from Dove shower gel to Magnum ice cream to appeal to millennial consumers. It doesn’t seem to be doing much for its sales. The Anglo-Dutch company surprised the stock market, warning that revenue growth this year ...

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German railroads should thank Greta Thunberg

The upshot of a much-publicised Twitter altercation between climate activist Greta Thunberg and Germany’s state-owned rail operator, Deutsche Bahn: Train companies aren’t really ready for an increasing number of passengers who want to fly less to minimise their carbon footprint. Last week, Thunberg tweeted a picture of herself sitting on the floor in a train vestibule, next to a pile ...

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Facebook pursues music video rights in challenge to YouTube

Bloomberg Facebook Inc is pursuing rights to music videos from major record labels, programming that could boost interest in its Watch video service, according to people familiar with the matter. The company is in the midst of negotiating new licensing deals with the three largest music companies, Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner Music Group, and has asked for ...

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AirPods, TikTok defined 2019 tech

Bloomberg It’s mid-December, which means it’s time for the staff prognosticators at Bloomberg Technology to sheepishly revisit last year’s predictions while peering ahead with a brash certainty that we haven’t earned. On its surface, 2019 was the difficult year that most of us anticipated. The simmering trade tensions (perhaps diffused by the new phase-one trade agreement) raised the prospect of ...

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NYC awaits Apple as FB, Google pounce in tech office boom

Bloomberg One year after the tech giant announced it would bring hundreds of jobs to New York, and on the heels of major Manhattan lease announcements by Facebook Inc and Amazon.com Inc, the city’s real estate industry is wondering when the iPhone developer will make its move. “The absence is surprising,” Jim Underhill, chief executive officer of commercial-property firm Cresa. ...

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Mercedes to pay up to $20mn for recall lapses

Bloomberg Daimler AG’s Mercedes Benz has agreed to pay as much as $20 million in penalties for violations of how it operated its vehicle recall programme. Mercedes Benz’s US arm must pay $13 million immediately while the remainder is deferred in case there are additional violations. The penalty was announced by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The company had ...

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Apple, Google, Amazon want one language for smart devices

Bloomberg Apple Inc, Alphabet Inc’s Google and Amazon.com Inc — three of the biggest smart-home and voice-assistant providers — are joining forces to make internet-connected homes easier to set up and safer to use. The rivals announced that they’re working with the Zigbee Alliance, a foundation that promotes standards for the Internet of Things, and its members including Samsung Electronics ...

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Boeing woes mount as capsule space station docking scrapped

Bloomberg Boeing Co. scrubbed plans for its CST-100 Starliner to rendezvous with the International Space Station on the capsule’s debut flight, raising doubts over whether the company will be able to ferry astronauts to the orbiting laboratory next year. The mishap represented another high-profile setback for an aerospace giant that was already contending with the prolonged grounding of its top-selling ...

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