The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) is weighing imposing penalties against US automaker Tesla, after the regulator found out that the company had embellished the specifications of its batteries.

The regulator sent a report to the electric vehicle (EV) producer stating that it had exaggerated the mileage of some of its models, including the Model 3, in violation of Korea’s Act on Fair Labeling and Advertising.

“We plan to hold a general meeting to review and determine the extent to which the automaker has violated the law and decide the level of sanctions,” an official at the KFTC told Reuters on Wednesday.

According to the company’s website, the Model 3 is able to travel 528 kilometers (328 miles) on a single charge. 

READ MORE: Tesla fights back against JPMorgan over Musk tweet

The South Korean regulator says that the range may fall short of this if the temperature drops below freezing.

Moreover, the KFTC is also considering imposing penalties against the world’s most valuable automaker for not refunding deposits to customers who cancelled online purchases before their vehicle orders were put in place.

In South Korea, Tesla requires customers to pay a deposit of 100,000 won ($84) when buying vehicles online, but deposits were allegedly not refunded upon customers’ order cancellations.

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Only 3% of white collar workers want to return to the office five days a week once the coronavirus-related restrictions are over, according to a new poll by the UK-headquartered management consultancy Advanced Workplace Associates (AWA).

AWA surveyed nearly 10,000 employees of companies it advises worldwide, finding that the number of people seeking to work full-time in the office has dwindled drastically amid the pandemic. Before Covid-19, some 35% of white collar workers were happy to work five days a week, but the number dropped to a mere 3% during the pandemic.

“That last two years have shown us that properly managed hybrid working is beneficial to both employers and employees,” Andrew Mawson, the managing director of AWA, said.

Now, some 86% of workers desire to work at least two days from home, preferring to go into the office mid-week on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. The same trend has been observed among all the age groups of white collar employees, AWA noted.

Forcing employees back into the office once the pandemic is over may prove to be a “potentially fatal mistake” for employers who would opt to do so, Mawson warned. He suspects it would lead to mass resignations and the workforce drifting to more flexible opportunities.

“Talented people will choose the employers that give them flexibility and – as we’ve seen with the so called ‘Great Resignation’ – employees will quit jobs if their bosses force them back into the office all the time,” Mawson said, referring to the trend observed in the West – primarily in the US – last year, when people began quitting their jobs by the millions.

“Employers have to realize that the genie is out of the bottle. Workers have seen that flexibility can work and bosses who are not sensitive to their employees’ needs will suffer accordingly,” Mawson concluded.

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The world’s richest person, Elon Musk, has donated roughly $6 billion worth of Tesla stock to charity. The donation of 5,044,000 shares was made between November 19 and November 29, according to a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The filing, revealed on Monday, doesn’t disclose the recipient or recipients of the shares.

Last October, Musk was challenged by the director of the UN World Food Program (WFP) to make a donation that would help solve world hunger.

Musk had pledged on social media to sell Tesla stock and donate $6 billion to the WFP if the organization could “describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger.” The executive director of the program, David Beasley, responded with a proposal two weeks later, and Musk began transferring shares to a charity several days after that.

READ MORE: Bill Gates shares ‘good news’ on progress of Covid pandemic

At the time, the billionaire was selling millions of shares in preparation for a large tax bill, while also exercising options for shares at much lower prices. Even with the gifted shares disclosed in Monday’s filing, Musk holds nearly two million more shares than he owned when he began selling the stock.

At the time of donations, Tesla’s stock was trading above $1,000 per share. The $5.7 billion donation became one of the biggest in history. The most generous donation was provided by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, who gave $15 billion in an annual ranking by the Chronicle of Philanthropy in 2021.

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Commercial banks have reportedly invested some $1.5 trillion in the coal industry since 2019. The study released by campaign groups Urgewald and Reclaim Finance on Tuesday says financial giants from the US, China, Japan, India, Canada and the UK play a major role in keeping the coal industry afloat, while policymakers and business leaders persistently call for energy transition.

The research says big investors from the listed nations are responsible for more than 80% of coal financing and investment.

“These financial institutions must come under fire from all quarters: civil society organizations, financial regulators, customers and progressive investors,” Katrin Ganswindt, head of financial research at Urgewald, said in the report seen by CNBC. “Unless we end financing of coal, it will end us.”

The research outlines all corporate lending and underwriting for companies on Urgewald’s Global Coal Exit List (GCEL) but excludes green bonds and financing that is directed toward non-coal activities. It refers to a list of 1,032 corporations accounting for 90% of the world’s thermal coal production and coal-fired capacity.

“Banks like to argue that they want to help their coal clients transition, but the reality is that almost none of these companies are transitioning. And they have little incentive to do so as long as bankers continue writing them blank checks,” Ganswindt said.

The findings show that 484 commercial banks channeled $1.2 trillion to companies on the GCEL through underwriting from January 2019 through to November last year with just 12 of them accounting for 39% of the total underwriting since 2019. Another 376 lenders provided $363 billion to the coal industry.

Meanwhile, 10 of these so-called “dirty dozen” lenders are members of the UN’s Net Zero Banking Alliance – an industry-led initiative focused on aligning their portfolios with net-zero emissions by 2050.

Japan’s Mizuho Financial, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial and SMBC Group are reportedly the top three lenders providing loans to the coal sector. They are followed by the UK’s Barclays and Wall Street’s Citigroup.

The research also finds nearly 5,000 institutional investors with combined holdings of over $1.2 trillion in the coal industry with the top 25 investors accounting for 46% of the total. US asset managers Blackrock and Vanguard are reportedly the largest institutional investors in coal.

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The Canadian government has moved to extend its financial regulations to crowdfunding platforms and cryptocurrencies under the Emergencies Act invoked Monday to crack down on “Freedom Convoy” trucker protests against Covid-19 mandates.

Under the emergency, which is due to last 30 days unless extended, all crowdfunding and crypto platforms must register with Canada’s financial intelligence agency FinTrac and report “large or suspicious” transactions, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Monday. This is an expansion of Canada’s existing money-laundering and terrorist-financing rules, and the government will propose a law that would make these powers permanent, she added.

“We know that these platforms are being used to support illegal blockades and illegal activity which is damaging the Canadian economy,” said Freeland.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has declared trucker protests – from the “Freedom Convoy” parking in front of the parliament in Ottawa to the blockades at three border crossings with the US – to be illegal and authorized federal police to help provinces and local authorities dismantle them.

The insurance on your vehicle will be suspended. Send your semi-trailers home. The Canadian economy needs them to be doing legitimate work, not to be illegally making us all poorer.

— Chrystia Freeland (@cafreeland) February 15, 2022

Canadian banks have also been instructed to freeze assets or “review their relationship” with anyone they suspect of being involved in such protests, without a court order. Companies whose trucks are being used in the “illegal” protests will have their accounts frozen and their insurance suspended, said Freeland.

The financial crackdown comes after Ottawa successfully pressured GoFundMe to freeze some CAN$10 million the trucker protest had raised, only to see the fundraiser move to GiveSendGo, a rival US platform. After GiveSendGo refused Canadian orders to freeze the funds, it was hacked and the trucker donor list was published online.

READ MORE: Personal data of Freedom Convoy donors leaked

This is the first time Canada has invoked the Emergencies Act since it was passed in 1988, to replace the old martial law first enacted in 1914. The War Measures Act had been used during the two world wars to impose controls on the Canadian economy and imprison citizens of German and Japanese origin. It was most recently used in 1970 by Trudeau’s father Pierre, to crack down on Francophone separatists in Quebec who had kidnapped a lawmaker. Almost 500 people were arrested during the period now known as the October Crisis.

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Ethereum-based cryptocurrency ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ has lost 99.5% of its value over the past 30 days, data from crypto-trading sites CoinMarketCap and Crypto showed on Monday. The value of the entire 330 trillion coins in circulation now totals several thousand dollars, while one LGB coin is worth effectively nothing.

The token, which is less than six months old, peaked in value at the end of last year after it was promoted by opponents of US President Joe Biden and NASCAR driver Brandon Brown, whose name inspired the coin title.

The token actually got its name from a euphemism substituting an entirely different phrase. During Brandon Brown’s post-victory interview with NBC at a NASCAR race in October, the crowd of spectators was loudly chanting “F**k Joe Biden,” but the sports reporter mistook the crowd’s words for “Let’s Go Brandon.” Campaigners picked up the phrase, and turned it into an anti-Biden rallying cry. For instance, Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis started using the term “Brandon administration,” and Senator Ted Cruz reportedly used the slogan on several occasions.

Crypto enthusiasts decided to cash in on the viral phrase, and launched a crypto token of the same name in November. Brandon Brown then accepted a partnership with the coin because he was in need of a sponsor for the 2022 season, despite public claims that he dislikes the use of his name in a political slogan. Brown was supposed to carry the slogan on the hood of his race car for two years.

However, NASCAR intervened in the craze last month, saying that it would not support the sponsorship deal. The coin started to rapidly lose appeal shortly afterwards, and its value has now nearly evaporated.

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Elon Musk has ribbed US regulators for forcing Tesla to recall more than half a million cars over safety concerns. The recall was due to their Boombox feature, a 2020 update that allows Tesla drivers to play sounds such as goat or fart noises outside the vehicle.

In a tweet on Sunday, Musk labeled the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) the “fun police” for forcing him to recall his product. “The fun police made us do it (sigh),” Musk responded to a Twitter follower who had asked him about the rationale behind the Boombox recall.

Last week, the NHTSA said the Boombox feature, which allowed Tesla drivers to play preset or custom sounds from an external speaker while the vehicle is moving, was increasing the risk of a crash. The regulator explained that the feature drowned out audible warnings for pedestrians, breaching safety standards in the US. Pedestrian warnings are required in all electric and hybrid vehicles, the NHTSA said, because EVs are quieter than cars with internal combustion engines.

It’s the fourth recall made public in two weeks, according to AFP, and the 11th recall in the past four months for the company. Last week, Tesla recalled 817,143 vehicles due to a chime that would not always sound if a driver’s seat belt was unbuckled. And just prior to that, the company recalled its “full self-driving” software, which had been programmed to roll through stop signs in certain circumstances.

The latest recall is a voluntary decision from Tesla after weeks of correspondence with the regulator. 

The company plans to remotely update its software to fix the Boombox problem, so that car owners won’t need to return to a service outlet to have the issue resolved. The update will disable the Boombox feature when the vehicle is in drive, reverse or neutral mode.

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Large global banks are spending billions on oil and gas projects despite their participation in the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), which claims to take steps to achieve net-zero emissions goals, ShareAction climate campaigners have found.

“NZBA [24] members provided at least $44.6 billion in financing to the top upstream oil gas expanders since they joined the alliance last year. More than half of this was provided by four founding signatories: Barclays, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and HSBC,” the group states in its report, published on Monday.

According to activists’ estimations, HSBC poured some $8.7 billion into new oil and gas projects in 2021, while Barclays put in $4.5 billion, and Deutsche Bank loaned $5.7 billion. BNP Paribas spent $46 billion on new fossil fuel projects since 2016 and boosted financing by 16% in 2021 compared to pre-pandemic levels. The banks’ funds were received by energy majors including Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, and Saudi Aramco.

“Despite many banks making net zero commitments in 2021 or before, many have actually increased their fossil fuel expansion financing in 2021… There is an increasing spotlight on oil gas expansion,” ShareAction reports.

Apart from the four largest investors in the sector, the group also named Credit Suisse, ING, Intesa Sanpaolo, UBS, Nordea, and Danske Bank among fossil fuel project supporters.

READ MORE: Fears of disruption push oil prices to 7-year high

The group urges investors to force banks to demand green plans from fossil fuel firms before funding them.

“Some 92% of finance to oil gas companies comes from general-purpose corporate loans. These can be directed into any subsidiary or project the company likes. As such this money can continue to go into helping the company expand its oil gas production… It is time investors upped the pressure on banks’ fossil fuel addiction,” campaigners state.

“Net zero” refers to not adding to greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere by cutting emissions, which are extremely large in the oil and gas production industry. The goal of the net zero agenda is to avoid damaging environmental effects, including global warming which is linked by some to greenhouse gasses.

Last year, the International Energy Agency said there should be no new oil and natural gas fields in order to achieve this goal, while the world’s leading climate science body – the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – reemphasized the climate threat, stressing that only quick and firm reductions in emissions will prevent the climate worsening within the next decade. However, according to oil giant Exxon Mobil, both agencies “agree that significant investment in oil and gas is still needed [in net zero scenarios].”

“Additional investment of approximately $11tn through 2050 would be required in both oil and natural gas development to meet the world’s energy demand,” the oil giant stated, as cited by the BBC. BP voiced in, saying that “resilient hydrocarbons are a core part of our strategy,” but noted that it expects “to hold investment in oil and gas” over this decade, while also expanding spending in transition growth businesses like EV charging, convenience, renewables, hydrogen and bioenergy. Overall, HSBC, BNP, Deutsche Bank and Barclays all confirmed their net zero pledges in comments to the BBC, but all added one way or the other that the process will take years.

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The former head of India’s National Stock Exchange (NSE), the country’s largest, shared confidential information with her yoga guru for years, seeking his advice when making performance decisions, a probe by India’s market regulator the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has found.

The regulator broke the news on Sunday, ahead of NSE’s public listing expected later this year. The matter regarding the yogi adviser surfaced during SEBI’s probe of the exchange following allegations that officials had provided some traders with unfair access through colocation servers.

After a three-year investigation, in 2019 SEBI fined the NSE over $90 million for violating contract rules and banned it from raising money on securities markets for six months.

During the investigation, however, SEBI also found that the NSE’s former CEO Chitra Ramkrishna, who quit the exchange in 2016 citing “personal reasons,” shared insider information in emails to an unknown person in the Himalayas. When questioned on the matter, Ramkrishna said the person was a “spiritual force” she consulted for some 20 years. The regulator stated that it was “absurd” for Ramkrishna to share the NSE’s sensitive information with an outsider.

READ MORE: Indian stocks soar to record highs as economic recovery picks up

“The sharing of financial and business plans of NSE… is a glaring, if not unimaginable, act that could shake the very foundations of the stock exchange,” SEBI said in an order that imposed fines on Ramkrishna, the exchange and several other top former executives. The information Ramkrishna shared included the NSE’s financial projections, dividend pay-out ratios, business plans, and board agenda. The ‘yogi’ was also found to have influenced the appointment of a mid-level executive directly as an adviser to Ramkrishna with a salary higher than most senior NSE officials while having next to no market experience and inadequate documentation.

According to SEBI’s findings, Ramkrishna’s Himalayan guru was effectively running the exchange for years, while the CEO was “merely a puppet in his hands.” Also, SEBI found that the exchange’s board was aware of Ramkrishna’s guru adviser, but chose to “keep the matter under wraps.”

The regulator has fined NSE 20 million rupees ($270,000) and barred the exchange from launching any new products for six months. It also imposed a 30 million rupees ($400,000) fine on Ramkrishna and banned her from any SEBI-registered intermediary work for three years.

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Oil prices hit their highest level since 2014 on Monday amid concerns that Russian supplies to Europe could be interrupted due to sanctions if tensions with Ukraine escalate.

Brent crude futures were at $95.67 a barrel by 7:30am GMT, up 1.3%, after hitting the highest level since October 2014 at $96.16 earlier in the day. US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude rose 1.4% to $94.39 a barrel, with a session-high of $94.94, also the highest in over seven years.

Both benchmarks reacted to last week’s claims from Washington about an imminent attack by Russia on Ukraine, which it predicted would take place later this week. According to Sunday’s statements from President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to CNN, Russia could invade Ukraine “any day now.” Such escalation could immediately push oil prices above the $100 threshold, experts say.

READ MORE: Russia enjoys $65 billion windfall as oil rallies

“If… troop movement happens, Brent crude won’t have any trouble rallying above the $100 level. Oil prices will remain extremely volatile and sensitive to incremental updates regarding the Ukraine situation,” OANDA analyst Edward Moya said in a note to Reuters.

Oil prices are also rising amid difficulties in trying to push up output faced by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies. Last year, the group decided to gradually increase oil production by 400,000 barrels per day until March, but many OPEC producers are failing to pump more crude, each due to their own technological or political problems. The International Energy Agency said oil output by OPEC and its allies in January was 900,000 bpd less than its target, while JP Morgan estimated it was 1.2 million bpd lower for OPEC alone.

“Seven members of OPEC-10 failed to meet quota increases in the month, with the largest shortfall exhibited by Iraq,” JP Morgan analysts said in a note on February 11, predicting that oil prices are “likely to overshoot to $125 a barrel on widening spare capacity risk premium.”

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