DAILY DOSE: March 6, 2021

Posted on 03/06/2021


1. Davy is Ireland’s largest securities firm. Davy CEO Brian McKiernan resigned after regulators accused the company of a “lack of candor” with regard to a scandal involving a consortium of employees buying bonds from a client in a personal capacity without the customer knowing they were the buyers. Davy was fined 4.13 million euros by the regulator.

2. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is mired in a series of allegations of sexual harassment from former employees. Now, the New York legislature, majority Democrat, approved a bill to repeal pandemic-era emergency powers afforded to Cuomo. The bill revokes temporary powers given to Cuomo in March 2020 that allowed him to supersede the legislature, as well as local laws. Last, Cuomo facing political heat into allegations that his administration deliberately covered up COVID-19 deaths of nursing home residents. Members of his own party have called for Cuomo’s resignation.

3. Robinhood stock trading app is selecting Nasdaq for its initial public offering.

4. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged AT&T, Inc. with repeatedly violating Regulation FD, and three of its Investor Relations executives with aiding and abetting AT&T’s violations, by selectively disclosing material nonpublic information to research analysts. According to the SEC’s complaint, AT&T learned in March 2016 that a steeper-than-expected decline in its first quarter smartphone sales would cause AT&T’s revenue to fall short of analysts’ estimates for the quarter. The complaint alleges that to avoid falling short of the consensus revenue estimate for the third consecutive quarter, AT&T Investor Relations executives Christopher Womack, Michael Black, and Kent Evans made private, one-on-one phone calls to analysts at approximately 20 separate firms.

5. U.S. border agents detained nearly 100,000 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in February 2021. Mexico’s economy has fallen on hard times due to low oil prices and COVID, while the Biden administration is offering incentives for immigrants to come to the country. February was Biden’s first full month in office.

6. EMAIL HACKING: Microsoft’s Exchange Server software have reportedly led to over 30,000 U.S. governmental and commercial organizations having their emails hacked, according to a report by KrebsOnSecurity. According to Microsoft Corporation, the vulnerabilities allowed hackers to gain access to email accounts. Worse, it gave hackers the ability to install malware that might let them back into those servers at a later time. Krebs report that the attack was carried out by Hafnium, a Chinese hacking group.

7. All nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have been fully vaccinated for the coronavirus. The newest associate justice, Amy Coney Barrett, is also the youngest at 49; the oldest, Stephen Breyer, is 82.

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