TheChek News Flow

Probe of defence group will be jointly conducted with France’s Parquet National Financier

The UK Serious Fraud Office has opened an investigation into defence company Thales over “serious allegations” of suspected bribery and corruption.

The SFO said on Thursday that the probe was being conducted jointly with France’s Parquet National Financier financial prosecutor and that the French-listed company had been informed it was under investigation.

Thales is headquartered in Paris and its UK subsidiary employs more than 7,000 staff in the UK at 16 sites. The group, which is partially owned by the French state, makes technology, sensors and software used in major defence programmes such as the Rafale fighter jet. It also provides technology for civilian aircraft.

Its facility in Belfast, Northern Ireland, makes missiles and launchers, including the shoulder-fired Starstreak missile that has been donated to Ukraine by the UK government. Thales also builds sonar systems for the Royal Navy’s submarines.

The case is the first investigation of a major public company opened under SFO director Nick Ephgrave, who took over the agency last year. The SFO has opened six investigations under Ephgrave but has faced criticism for not pursuing larger companies with more international operations.

“Working collaboratively with our international partners is a crucial factor in the fight against international corruption and with this case I hope to reinforce the SFO and PNF’s long-standing relationship,” Ephgrave said in a statement.

“We will together rigorously pursue every avenue in our investigation into these serious allegations,” he added.

Thales confirmed that the SFO and the PNF had begun an investigation “in relation to four of its entities in France and the UK. Thales is co-operating with the PNF in France and the SFO in the UK”.

“The group complies with all national and international regulations. As the investigation is ongoing, Thales will not comment further,” it said in a statement.

The news comes after the SFO shut down a four-year investigation of aircraft manufacturer Bombardier this week, deferring to probes in the US and Canada.

The SFO said in a statement that overseas authorities were “best placed to progress this case to its final stages” and that the agency would work with its counterparts in their investigations.

WhatsApp announced on Thursday it’s rolling out voice message transcripts. The Meta-owned company says the new feature will come in handy when you’re on the move or in a loud place where you can’t listen to a voice message. A similar feature was announced last year for Apple’s Message app, a top WhatsApp competitor, with the release of Apple’s software update, iOS 17.

With the new feature, voice messages can be transcribed into text to help you keep up with conversations when you’re unable (or perhaps unwilling) to listen to a voice message. WhatsApp claims its transcripts are generated on your device and no one else can read them.

To access the new WhatsApp feature, you need to go into your settings, select the “Chats” section, and then tap “Voice message transcripts” to turn the feature on. From there, you can select your transcript language.

Once you have turned on the feature you can get a transcript for a voice message by long-pressing it and then tapping the “transcribe” option. It will not automatically transcribe every message for you, that is.

Voice message transcripts are rolling out globally over the coming weeks in select languages, the company says.

On iOS, the languages that are supported depend on your OS. If you have iOS 16+, the supported languages include English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, and Arabic. If you have iOS 17+, the supported languages include Danish, Finish, Malay, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Hebrew, and Thai.

If you have an Android, you can access transcripts in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian.

WhatsApp plans to add support for additional languages in the coming months.

Move in effect bans state-owned bank from global financial system in blow to payments for Moscow’s war effort

The US has imposed sanctions on Gazprombank, one of the few major Russian lenders not already blacklisted over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, in a move aimed at restricting the Kremlin’s ability to finance its war effort.

The listing announced on Thursday in effect bans state-owned Gazprombank, the main conduit for Russian energy payments, and its six international subsidiaries from the US-dominated global finance system.

Russia has used Gazprombank as a conduit to buy military equipment for the war in Ukraine, as well as to pay soldiers and compensate the families of those killed in action, according to the US.

“This sweeping action will make it harder for the Kremlin to evade US sanctions and fund and equip its military,” US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen said.

“We will continue to take decisive steps against any financial channels Russia uses to support its illegal and unprovoked war in Ukraine.”

The UK and Canada both imposed sanctions on Gazprombank in the early weeks of the war in 2022.

The US had previously avoided following suit largely so that European countries could continue to pay for Russian gas supplies.

During the war, however, the EU has sharply reduced its reliance on Russian pipeline gas from 40 per cent to less than 8 per cent of the bloc’s energy mix.

The fresh sanctions come as contracts for Russian gas transit through Ukraine to European countries including Slovakia and the Czech Republic expire on January 1. After the Nord Stream pipelines connecting Germany to Russia via the Baltic Sea were blown up in 2022, this became one of only two routes by which Russian pipeline gas is exported to Europe.

Kyiv has refused to negotiate an extension of the transit contracts, meaning that the remaining Russian supplies will dry up and will no longer have to be paid for. “The agreement with Russia will not be renewed, period, end of story,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in August.

However, according to an S&P report from October, Russia continues to sell nearly 70 per cent of its liquefied natural gas to Europe, though these volumes are significantly lower than pipeline supplies. While the US and UK have banned Russian LNG, the EU sourced 20 per cent of its LNG from Russia. The Financial Times reported that Germany has recently decided to reject Russian gas cargoes, indicating a potential shift in this balance.

Gazprom, Russia’s state gas export monopoly, also cut supplies to Austria earlier this month after a court ruled it owed energy company OMV €230mn.

The US sanctions will close one of Russia’s few remaining windows to international banking by barring Gazprombank from transacting in dollars.

Washington is also seeking to discourage foreign banks from doing business with Russia by threatening secondary sanctions against those that process transactions for Russia’s war machine.

As part of that effort, the US warned banks in third countries they risked sanctions if they signed up to Russia’s System for Transfer of Financial Messages, a Kremlin-backed alternative to the Swift banking messaging system.

The Treasury said it viewed joining the Russian payments system “as a red flag and is prepared to more aggressively target foreign financial institutions that take such action”.

The US also imposed sanctions on more than 50 small Russian banks and 40 securities registrars, and 15 technocrats it said were involved in “abusing the international financial system to pay for the technology and equipment it needs to sustain its illegal and unjust war against Ukraine”.

The push has hit Russia’s imports by deterring counterparties in neutral countries and forcing banks to process transactions through complex networks of intermediaries.

In September, Russia’s economy ministry revised its forecast for imports in 2024 down by 9 per cent to $295bn from its April prediction of $324bn.

Russia’s central bank said this month that the payments sanctions had created a “significant” rise in costs and difficulties supplying raw materials by making it difficult for importers to settle transactions.

Wiz, one of the most talked-about names in the world of cybersecurity, is making a significant acquisition to expand its product reach in cloud security, particularly with developers. It is buying Dazz, a specialist in security remediation and risk management. Sources tell us the deal is valued at $450 million in a mix of cash and shares.

This is a bump on the startup’s last funding round. In July, we reported that Dazz raised $50 million on a post-money valuation of just under $400 million.

Remediation and posture management — the two areas where Dazz focuses — are key services in the cybersecurity market that Wiz was not covering as well as it wanted to.

“Dazz is the leader in this market, with the best talent and the best customers, and it’s a great culture fit,” said Assaf Rappaport, Wiz’s CEO, in an interview.

Remediation, which refers to helping to understand and resolve vulnerabilities, gives shape to how an enterprise actually tackles the many vulnerability alerts they might receive from across their networks. Posture management is a more preemptive product: it gives an organization a better understanding of the size, shape and function of its network from the perspective to build better security services around that.

Dazz will continue to operate as a separate entity while it’s integrated into the larger Wiz stack. Wiz has built a name for itself as a “one-stop-shop”, and Rappaport said that an integrated offering will continue to be a major part of that.

He believes that is in contrast with how a lot of other SaaS businesses have been built. In the security industry, there are, Rappaport said, “a lot of Frankenstein mashups, where companies are prioritizing revenues over building one technology stack that actually works as a platform.” Arguably, integration is even more important in cybersecurity than in other areas of enterprise IT.

Wiz and Dazz already had a close relationship going into this deal. Merav Bahat — the CEO who co-founded Dazz with Tomer Schwartz and Yuval Ofir (CTO and VP R&D, respectively) — worked closely with Assaf Rappaport at Microsoft, which acquired his previous startup Adallom.

After Rappaport left to found Wiz with his past Adallom co-founders CTO Ami Luttwak, VP Product Yinon Costica, and VP R&D Roy Reznik, Bahat was one of its first investors. Similarly, when Bahat started Dazz, Assaf was a small investor in that.

The connection goes deeper than work colleagues. Bahat and Rappaport are also close friends, and she was a second family to Mika, Rappaport’s beloved dog who was known as Wiz’s Chief Dog Officer (complete with LinkedIn profile). As the deal went down, the two faced two very sad developments: both Bahat’s mother and Mika passed away.

“We’re hoping for a new chapter of positivity here,” Bahat said. The cycle of life indeed continues onward.

Rumors about this acquisition started to surface earlier this month; Rappaport confirmed that this was when they had started to talk seriously.

But that’s not the only M&A chatter that has involved Wiz. Earlier this year, Google tried to buy Wiz itself for $23 billion to build a significant cybersecurity business. Wiz walked away from the deal, which would have been Google’s biggest, partly because Rappaport said he believed Wiz could become an even bigger company on its own terms. And is what it is aiming for with this deal.

The acquisition is one of a run for Wiz, which earlier this year filled its coffers with $1 billion expressly for the purpose of M&A (it’s raised nearly $2 billion in total, and we’ve heard that another round will close in several more weeks). Other deals have included buying Gem Security for $350 million, but Dazz is its biggest acquisition yet.

There may be more M&A to come. “We believe that next year is going to be a year of acquisitions for us,” Rappaport said.

Speaking to TC, Luttwak said that one of the priorities for Wiz right now is to build out more tools for developers, addressing what they need to get their jobs done.

Enterprises have made significant investments into cloud services to speed up how they work and to make their IT more flexible, but that shift has come with a significantly changed security profile for those organizations: Network and data architectures are more complicated, and attack surfaces are larger, creating opportunities for malicious hackers to find ways to breach those systems. AI is making all of that significantly more challenging in terms of malicious attackers. (It’s also an opportunity: a new generation of tools to defend us are all built on AI.)

Wiz’s unique selling point has been an all-in-one approach. Ingesting data from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other cloud environments, Wiz scans applications, data and network processes for security risk factors and provides a range of detailed views to its users to understand where those risks exist, with more than a dozen products covering areas like code security, container environment security and supply chain security, as well as a number partner integrations for those working with other providers (or to incorporate functions that Wiz does not offer directly).

Indeed, Wiz offered a degree of remediation to help prioritise and fix issues, but as Luttwak said, Dazz’s product is just better.

“We now have a platform that can actually give you a 360-degree view of risk, covering infrastructure and application,” he said. “Dazz is the leader in attack surface posture management, the ability to collect vulnerability signals from the application layer across the stack, and build the most amazing context that allows you to track it back to the engineers, to help with remediation.”

On the side of Dazz, when I interviewed Bahat in July 2024, when Dazz raised $50 million on a $350 million valuation, she extolled the virtues of building a strong point solution and this week, she said that Q3 was “amazing.”

“But the momentum in the market is something that ignites these kind of deals,” she said. Dazz had been getting acquisition offers from other companies, too, she confirmed. “If you think about the customers and the joint customers that we have with Wiz, it makes sense for them to have it in one platform.”

And some of Dazz’s competitors are still going it alone: Cyera, like Dazz an expert in attack surface management, just yesterday announced a $300 million raise on a $5 billion valuation (confirming a scoop of ours). But what is it going to do with that money? Make acquisitions, of course.

Wiz says it is now at $500 million in annual recurring revenues (it’s aiming for $1B in ARR in the next year), and counts over 45% of the Fortune 100 as customers. Dazz said that ARR was in the tens of millions of dollars and it is currently growing at 500% on a customer base of about 100 organizations.

Francesco Falai, currently Gucci’s senior vice president of global people retail and business, will assume the role of chief people officer on Jan. 1, succeeding Luca Bozzo, who is exiting the company.

MILAN – Stefano Cantino’s reorganization of Gucci continues.

Effective Jan. 1, Francesco Falai, currently Gucci’s senior vice president of global people retail and business, will assume the role of chief people officer. He will report to Cantino, currently deputy chief executive officer, who will transition to the role of CEO on the same day, succeeding Jean-François Palus.

Falai will succeed Luca Bozzo. The latter will exit Gucci at the end of December to pursue an external career opportunity after more than seven years with the company and 14 years within parent Kering Group. This confirms a WWD report earlier this month.

“During his tenure, Bozzo played a key role in contributing to Gucci’s success by bringing an innovative HR strategy and strengthening a dynamic, people-empowerment culture,” Gucci stated in a note seen exclusively by WWD.

Falai joined Gucci in January 2017 as worldwide HR retail director, following 12 years at the Prada Group, where he held roles of increasing responsibility within the HR division. During his time at Gucci, Falai has progressively expanded his scope to include all business functions.

In his new role, Falai with Cantino will be tasked “to drive Gucci’s people strategy, inspiring excellence in execution, and fostering organizational development and transformation. In particular, Falai will collaborate with stakeholders across the company to empower the contributions of internal teams to the business,” stated Gucci.

This is the latest step of the structure Cantino has been building over the past few months.

As reported, Valérie Leberichel will join Gucci as senior vice president of global communications at the end of December, reporting directly to Cantino. Gucci is leveraging her 27 years of experience in marketing and communication strategy. Since April 2022 she has been global vice president of communications at Givenchy, which is in the midst of its own turnaround with the arrival of former Alexander McQueen creative director Sarah Burton.

Reporting to Leberichel, Marcello Mastrogiacomo will join on Nov. 25 as vice president digital marketing and media. Mastrogiacomo has more than 17 years of experience in global marketing, most recently serving as senior vice president, communication, media and image at Armani Beauty Global within L’Oréal, the Italian designer’s longtime beauty licensee.

Earlier strategic hires include Massimo Vian from the Prada Group as chief industrial and supply chain officer, and Cayetano Fabry from Saint Laurent as chief commercial officer.

Another recent development at Gucci is the brand’s plan to return to the coed format.

Creative director Sabato De Sarno will present the brand’s men’s and women’s collections together in a single fashion show in February and September, respectively, as part of the Milan Fashion Week calendar. The cruise 2026 fashion show is expected to take place in Florence on May 15.