Benzinga Before The Bell: Instagram Head To Relocate To London, SEC Charges 11 for $300M Crypto Ponzi Scheme, Oracle's Layoffs And Other Top Financial Stories Tuesday, August 2

Reuters

Toyota Affiliate Held Responsible For Fudging Emissions Data From At Least 2003, Investigation Finds

• Toyota Motor Corp (NYSE: TM) affiliate doctored emissions data on some engines going back to at least 2003, more than a decade earlier than previously indicated.
• The investigative committee tasked by truck and bus maker Hino Motors Ltd (OTC: HINOY) attributed the scandal to an environment where engineers failed to challenge superiors.
• Hino set up the committee after it admitted to falsifying data related to emissions and fuel performance of four engines.

Wall Street Journal

Apollo-Led Group In Advanced Negotiations To Purchase Atlas Air

• A group led by Apollo Global Management (NYSE: APO) is in advanced talks to acquire the airfreight company Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings, Inc (NASDAQ: AAWW), reported Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter.
• The source states that a deal could come soon, assuming talks don't fall apart.
• Atlas Air, situated in Purchase, New York, has a market value of about $2 billion and flies for freight, business, charter, and the military.

Bloomberg

Oracle Joins The Club For Downsizing Employees: Report

• Oracle Corp (NYSE: NYSE:ORCL) slashed jobs in marketing and the U.S. customer experience division, signaling a retreat in customer analytics and advertising services, Bloomberg reports.
• The job reductions coincided with Oracle's focus on health care to win a share in the cloud technology market.
• Junior sales employees and a division sales director were among those let go.

• Indian food-delivery company Zomato Ltd will appoint multiple CEOs to lead its business units, Bloomberg reported.
• The company is also planning to rename itself Eternal Ltd.
• The moves come after Zomato won the approval to acquire another grocer-delivery startup, Blinkit.
• Zomato, which is backed by Ant Group Co. (NYSE: BABA), Temasek Holdings Pte. and Goldman Sachs Group , Inc. (NYSE: NYSE:GS), said in an internal memo about naming CEOs for at least four units.

Financial Times

Instagram Head Adam Mosseri Looks To Shift Base To London, Establish Biggest Overseas Engineering Hub

• Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ: META) Instagram head Adam Mosseri looked to shift base to London, signaling a strategic shift for the social networking app that battled TikTok to win younger audiences, the Financial Times reports.
• The move will effectively make the U.K. capital, parent Meta's biggest overseas engineering hub, and Instagram's base over the coming months.
• Mosseri will relocate later this year and build out Instagram's presence in London by hiring more staff to work at Meta's new offices in King's Cross.

• Melco Resorts & Entertainment Ltd (NASDAQ: MLCO) is planning to relocate its headquarters to Macau in order to avoid being delisted in the U.S., the Financial Times reported.
• The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had said about 200 Chinese and Hong Kong corporations listed in New York will be made to delist in 2024 if they fail to comply with audit disclosure legal guidelines.
• Melco is a $2.5 billion online casino group run by Hong Kong online casino mogul Lawrence Ho.

Benzinga

BP (LON:BP)'s Q2 Earnings Triple On Rising Energy Prices, Boosts Quarterly Dividend

• BP Plc (NYSE: BP) posted a Q2 underlying profit of $8.5 billion, its highest in 14 years, from $2.8 billion a year ago, driven by strong realized refining margins, continuing exceptional oil trading performance, and higher liquids realizations.
• Total revenues increased 85% to $69.5 billion.
• BP increased its dividend by 10% to 6.006 cents per share, more than its previous guidance of a 4% annual increase through 2025. It halved the dividend to 5.25 cents in July 2020 for the first time in a decade in the wake of the pandemic.

• Billionaire hedge fund manager and New York Mets owner Steve Cohen has exited his investment in cryptocurrency startup Radkl.
• A spokesperson from the company told Bloomberg that the quantitative crypto trading firm "remains well capitalized" despite Cohen's departure.
• Earlier this year, two of the firm's managing directors Jim Greco and Beatrice O'Carroll left the company.

• The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged 11 people for their roles in creating and promoting an allegedly fraudulent crypto-focused pyramid & Ponzi scheme that raised more than $300 million from investors.
• Forsage scheme allowed retail investors to enter transactions via smart contracts that operated on the Ethereum (ETH/USD), Tron (TRX/USD), and Binance (BNBT/USD) blockchains.
• The SEC alleges that the setup functioned like a standard pyramid scheme for more than two years, in which investors earned profits by recruiting others into the operation.

• The overall fear level increased in the U.S. stock markets after Wall Street settled slightly lower on Monday, according to the CNN Money Fear and Greed index.
• U.S. stocks settled lower on Monday following a volatile trading session on Monday, after recording the biggest monthly surge in two years.
• Stocks recorded gains last week on prospects that the US Federal Reserve might not act as aggressively with rate increases as some market experts had expected.

• Over $190 million was drained from cross-chain cryptocurrency bridge Nomad on Monday in what is being described as one of the most perplexing hacks in DeFi history.
• On Aug. 1, market participants observed millions of dollars being drained from the Nomad contract address.
• Data from DeFi Llama shows that more than $190 million worth of Ethereum ETH/USD and other tokens were drained from the Total Value Locked (TVL) in the bridge.

• To diffuse tensions between the U.S. and China over Nancy Pelosi's unconfirmed trip to Taiwan, the White House National Security Council coordinator John Kirby said the U.S. position on Taiwan remains what it has been over the last four decades.
• Kirby stressed that any visit to the island nation by Pelosi reflects neither a change in policy nor the wishes of the Biden administration.
• "The world has seen the United States government be very clear that nothing has changed — nothing has changed — about our One China policy," he said, adding that "we do not support Taiwan independence."

• Software automation company UiPath, Inc (NYSE: PATH) snapped up artificial intelligence startup Re:infer Ltd. The financial terms of the transaction remain undisclosed.
• Re:infer was founded in 2015 by Ph.D. scientists from the AI research lab at University College London.
• Re:infer uses machine learning (ML) technology to mine context from communication messages and transform them into actionable data with speed and accuracy.

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