Back at it after the holiday weekend. Hope all had a good break.
Vaping powerhouse Juul has reached a sweeping deal to resolve a multi-state inquiry over its “sales and marketing practices that they claim fueled the teenage vaping crisis.” Under the tentative agreement, Juul would pay $438.5 million to the nearly 36 states involved in the investigation and would be barred from “marketing to youth, from funding education in schools and misrepresenting the level of nicotine in its products” - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and Law360 and TechCrunch
Meanwhile, across the pond, Irish data authorities have fined Instagram parent company Meta $400 million for “breaking European Union data privacy laws for its treatment of children’s data” on the photo-sharing platform, “the latest in a series of steps by authorities in Europe and the Untied States to crack down on what information is collected and shared by companies about young people online” - NYTimes and Law360
The EU has also blocked the Illumina/Grail deal “just days after a U.S. administrative law judge allowed it to go forward.” Antitrust regulators there said “the purchase would stifle innovation and reduce choice in an emerging market for early cancer-detection blood tests” - WSJ and Law360
CVS struck a deal this week for roughly $8 billion to acquire Signify Health, “which runs a network of doctors making house calls.” If approved by CVS shareholders and regulators, the deal “would give CVS . . . a new avenue to reach its customers: at home” - NYTimes
Ernst & Young leaders are expected this week to move forward with a plan that would separate the company’s auditing and consulting businesses, “paving the way for the biggest shake-up in the accounting profession in more than 20 years” - WSJ
A new NLRB rule proposal governing when companies are considered “joint-employers” would, if approved, “make more companies legally liable for labor law violations committed by their contractors or franchisees” by linking liability to indirect control—a departure from the current approach adopted in 2020 - NYTimes and Law360
Apple’s set to announce its latest round of iPhones later today. Even as it builds some of those models “outside China for the first time,” the Times helps us understand “how complicated it will be for Apple to truly untangle itself from China,” as the product is now truly “a creation of both” that country and the U.S. - NYTimes
Lawyers for Elon Musk have urged the Delaware Court of Chancery to push back the October trial date “on Twitter’s suit to compel closing on Musk’s $44 billion deal to buy the company.” The request cam in a contentious afternoon hearing yesterday over the alleged discovery misdeeds of each side – Law360 and WSJ
Bed Bath & Beyond has named Laura Crossen as its interim CFO, just days after the death by suicide of its former officer. The company “warned investors last week that it expected to post another quarter of negative cash flow and forecast that sales would fall around 20 percent this year” - NYTimes and WSJ and MarketWatch
Turns out Abbott Labs and its lawyers have been working overtime for years to keep the trickle of lawsuits over infants poisoned by the company’s powdered baby formula from becoming the kind of news that led to the 2022 recall and shuttering of Abbott’s Sturgis, Michigan production facility - NYTimes
Target CEO Brian Cornell will stay on in his top role at the retailer for at least another 3 years after the company’s Board “eliminated its mandatory retirement age of 65, seeking to provide stability at a time of upheaval in the retail industry” - WSJ and MarketWatch
The SEC has sued a SPAC advisor for “failing to properly disclose conflicts of interest tied to” the blank check companies they sponsored, the “latest example of Wall Street’s main regulator clamping down on the once white-hot market” - Bloomberg
Not quite the “if you build it, he will come” story you know. But Iowa can surprise, no? - NYTimes
Stay safe,
MDR
