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By giving their employees the freedom to work from anywhere, Bay Area tech companies appear to have touched off an exodus. ‘Why do we even want to be here?’

For years there’s been talk of a potential exodus from the San Francisco Bay Area, spurred by the exorbitant cost of living and long, slogging commutes. But before coronavirus, leaving the area meant walking away from some of the best-paying and most prestigious jobs in America.

There are signs the exodus is finally happening. Silicon Valley, America’s signature hub of innovation, may never be the same.

Tech companies are giving their employees more freedom to work from anywhere. Employees are taking them up on the option to relocate, forming the beginnings of a shift that could reshape not only the Bay Area, but also the cities where these tech workers are making new homes.

It’s early days, and information about who’s leaving and where they’re heading is just starting to come in. But for those who are looking, the evidence is there.

Two things suggested to Justin Thompson and his wife that they weren’t alone in deciding to move out of San Francisco this summer. After five years of renting an apartment, the couple had decided to buy a three-bedroom house in Phoenix.

First, their landlord offered to reduce their rent by $250 a month if they’d finish out their lease through October. (They declined.) And second, when Mr. Thompson went in for a dental checkup and said it would be his last, his dentist was unsurprised.

“He said, ‘I have people coming in almost daily telling me the same thing,’” said Mr. Thompson, who works for a data analytics firm.

Google-parent Alphabet Inc. last month said employees won’t be returning to the office until at least the summer of 2021, in part so they can sign one-year leases somewhere else. Facebook Inc. recently said its employees could stay away for that long too. The social-media giant, which has 52,000 employees, expects to shift to a substantially remote workforce over the coming decade, and is now recruiting a director of remote work. Other companies including Twitter Inc. and Slack Technologies Inc. have declared most of their employees can work remotely for good.

Cybersecurity firm Tanium, headquartered in Emeryville, Calif., across the bay from San Francisco, also told its 1,500 employees at the end of June that they could work remotely permanently. Since then, 16% of the workers based at Tanium’s headquarters have either formally requested or inquired about relocation, according to a spokeswoman. The company’s chief executive, Orion Hindawi, relocated to Seattle last month.

Around 40% of Facebook’s employees were interested in permanent remote work, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in May, citing an internal survey. Three quarters of those employees said they might move to another place. Facebook declined to say how many employees have formally requested to relocate.

A survey of 371 Bay Area tech workers, conducted in mid-May by the recruitment marketplace Hired, found that 42% would move to a less expensive city if their employer asked them to work remotely full-time. Another survey at the end of July by Blind, a platform for workers to discuss their jobs anonymously, found that 15% of more than 3,300 Bay Area professionals who responded had left the region since the pandemic began—though it was unclear how many considered their moves to be temporary. Of those remaining, 59% said they would consider relocating if their companies allow it.

While it’s too soon to measure the total net outflow of tech workers from the Bay Area, it’s already affecting real-estate prices. Rents have started falling for the first time in years. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco in the month of July dropped by 11% compared with the same month a year prior, according to rental-listings platform Zumper, which analyzed nearly 11,000 listings in the city and several surrounding areas. In Cupertino, home to Apple Inc., and Mountain View, home to Google, the median rent for one-bedroom apartments fell by more than 15%.

“The majority of techies in the Bay Area are not about to move out, but it is a significant enough minority that it’s moving the market,” said Zumper CEO Anthemos Georgiades. “This year is the first year that it’s actually real.”

While the pandemic has slowed or stalled rent increases in cities nationwide, San Francisco stands out, said Joshua Clark, an economist at real-estate search service Zillow. Rents in the city have fallen for the first time since the firm began tracking in 2014.

“The fact that San Francisco has turned negative, that is rare,” Mr. Clark said. He attributes that in part to the heights that San Francisco’s housing costs had reached before the pandemic.

Those who are leaving the area permanently cite a variety of reasons, but high housing costs tend to be at the top of the list. Between 2009 and 2019, the median cost of a single-family home in the San Francisco Bay Area nearly tripled to around $1 million. Even renting a bunk bed in a room with five other people can cost over $1,300 a month.

The region is expensive in other ways too. Getting a cheeseburger and fries delivered can easily cost $25. An ice cream cone can cost $7. Before the pandemic hit, classes at boutique gyms routinely ran $30.

A large departure of tech workers could have significant implications for the industry, the Bay Area, and for other cities across the U.S. seeking to draw more tech jobs, say executives and analysts.

Surveen Singh, 30 years old, moved from Houston to San Francisco nearly six years ago for a job at a large tech company. She used to spend roughly three hours a day commuting between the city’s west side and her company’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. Like many tech workers, Ms. Singh would work while sitting in traffic on company-provided shuttle buses.

She enjoyed working in headquarters, where perks included free meals, midday gym workouts and a strong sense of community. But when the coronavirus slammed into California in March, she was in Houston for a family wedding, and she hasn’t returned. Once her company opened up the possibility of permanent remote work, she asked to relocate to Los Angeles. She agreed to a pay cut but is convinced she’ll get more for her money and have a better quality of life.

“In San Francisco, no living space seems that normal. There’s always a weird element to it,” said Ms. Singh. “You don’t have a closet or a dishwasher—or there’s no parking.”

Like Ms. Singh, many of those leaving have to take a pay cut. Tech companies including Facebook and Slack have said that relocating will affect people’s compensation. A Twitter spokeswoman said the company is still reviewing its policies but that it has “a competitive approach to pay localization.”

But the employees say even smaller paychecks can buy more elsewhere.

Emily Fortner says the mortgage payment on the 2,300-square-foot house she and her husband bought last month in Durham, N.C., is about $1,500 a month less than the rent they were paying for a Berkeley home less than half its size. The 32-year-old, who works in content strategy for Twitter, and her husband, who works at Fitbit Inc., both took pay cuts. But in addition to their reduced housing costs, they also don’t have to spend money on commuting anymore, or pay a dog walker. North Carolina’s income and sales taxes are also lower.

“The small adjustment down is not going to harm our budget,” she said.

Ms. Fortner and her husband used to take advantage of San Francisco’s art, culture and restaurants. But their favorite things to do in the city have all been limited by the virus in recent months, and it’s unclear when they’ll be comfortable partaking in them again: “That made us start thinking, why do we even want to be here?” she said.

Jaime Contreras, 41 years old, recently got a new job with a California-based startup. After 14 years in the Bay Area, which included work at Airbnb Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc., he decided during the pandemic to move closer to family, buying a two-family duplex in Racine, Wis., for $160,000. Currently unmarried with no kids, he plans to rent out one level. Since he negotiated his salary as a remote worker, it won’t change when he moves to Wisconsin.

“If you have the luxury of maintaining your Bay Area salary and moving elsewhere, it goes a lot, lot longer,” he said. “I’ll live like a king.”

In Denver, Phoenix and Austin, homes have been selling at accelerated rates in recent months, according to Zillow. Nationally, the median list price of homes was up 6.6% for the year ended Aug. 1, while in San Francisco, list prices are down by nearly 5%.

Some of those leaving the city aren’t going far. Rents have gone up in Sacramento, about 90 miles from San Francisco. In Marin county, across the Golden Gate Bridge, the median home price for detached homes rose 5% in June compared with 2019, according to the county assessor’s office. There’s little housing for sale and real-estate agents say the pandemic has prompted bidding wars. “It’s nuts right now,” says Jennifer Falla-Firkins of Sotheby’s International Realty. “All my buyers are very frustrated.”

And across the Bay Bridge in Oakland, demand for single-family homes is outpacing supply, said Taylor Marr, an economist with Redfin.

“The Oakland market is rebounding much stronger than the San Francisco market,” he said.

Laura Dodd, 36 years old, a program manager for the software-development company Atlassian, kept in mind that the workplace might look different a year from now when she and her husband bought a four-bedroom house in her hometown of Sacramento. After eight years in San Francisco, Ms. Dodd, who is pregnant and already has a toddler, received approval to work remotely for a year. She and her husband were drawn to the idea of owning a home, which they couldn’t afford in San Francisco, and by being closer to family who could help watch the kids at a time when day care is unreliable.

But she’s also hedging her bets. Part of Sacramento’s appeal was that if her colleagues start working at the San Francisco office regularly, she can drive down on occasion. If being away from the office starts hurting her career, she’s prepared to rent out their Sacramento house and move back.

“I get it, ‘Lean In,’ but this is the time to maybe cool it and do what I can to make it work,” she said.

The San Francisco region had already been losing residents in recent years. From 2016 through 2019, more people moved out than moved in. But traditionally, the people leaving have been lower to middle income, according to Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto.

If more tech workers were to flee, traffic would likely improve and housing costs could come down, but there’d also be less tax revenue for an already stretched government, and less money spent at local businesses, he said.

“Unless we build more housing, there will be plenty of people to come in and bid stuff up,” said Mr. Levy. “Really, the loss of high-income people makes life more difficult.”

Some researchers say it wouldn’t take that many tech workers departing for there to be ripple effects.

“Even just 5% I think would be a massive alteration,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution. Regional economies around the U.S. could benefit from being home to remote workers from the biggest companies. And while the tech giants themselves might keep their top talent close by, ultimately they too could benefit from more distributed recruitment strategies.

“I think that the tech companies have realized that they may be missing actual ideas or talent out in the rest of the country,” he said.

In fact, tech companies could start upping their recruiting efforts not just all over the country but all over the world. That raises the potential for the tech labor market to be upended by globalization the same way other sectors of the U.S. labor market have been.

“American tech workers would be in great competition with those in India and Russia and Slovenia,” he said. “It certainly could subject tech workers to global talent markets that could in that sense bid down the value of their work.”

Mr. Muro said he doesn’t see Silicon Valley losing its competitive edge: Innovation in things like artificial intelligence will still come predominantly out of this area and there will still be tech workers who want to be here. Talent just may be more spread out than before the virus.

Amy Webb, an author and CEO of the research and consulting firm Future Today Institute, said smaller cities that are desirable to tech workers would be smart to plan for issues like increased traffic, parking problems, more waste and wealth disparities from new clusters of higher-wage earners.

On the plus side, even a small wave of tech migrants would mean a larger tax base and the potential for new tech hubs to grow.

“Maybe the people stay with those big tech companies forever or maybe they spin off and meet with others and start building new things,” she said.

Cities should develop long-term strategic plans and then court tech workers the way they did Amazon.com Inc. when it was shopping for a second headquarters, she said, offering property-tax incentives to those willing to move in exchange for donating some of their time and tech skills to local schools, for example.

“If you do this right, this is how a city like Baltimore—or Detroit or pick any number of other cities—this is how you rebuild for the longer term,” she said.

Some in the tech industry caution against overreacting to the early signs of Silicon Valley flight.

“There’s always been this thing about the exodus out of the Bay Area,” said Mehul Patel, the CEO of Hired, who has lived in the area for more than 20 years. He recalls that after the implosion of the dot-com bubble that peaked in 2000, “everyone was like, ‘Everyone is leaving. You can do a startup anywhere,’ and we were back to where we were within a year or two.”

There’s already evidence that the initial allure of remote work is starting to wear off, and that early productivity gains might have been driven by people fearing layoffs.

Still, Mr. Patel believes coronavirus will have a long-term impact on recruitment in tech. Hired has been trying to fill a product designer role in San Francisco for over a year but couldn’t find candidates willing to move. The company has since made the role remote, and is considering candidates from around the country.

Anthony Emberley, 25 years old, who was laid off from his job as a product manager at Uber in May, flirted with the idea of taking a break from San Francisco but has decided against it because he’s starting his own company.

“Even with this exodus that is happening, I still think that S.F. is the best place to be,” he said.

Mr. Emberley did negotiate a 10% rent reduction for the 3-bedroom apartment he shares with two roommates.

“We’re happy with what we got,” he said. “It was $5,250 before for a three-bedroom, which was already less than the average in S.F.”

Until the U.S. Census Bureau releases data, the only real way to know how many people are moving is from the tech companies themselves. Apple declined to share information on the volume of employee-relocation requests, as did Twitter and Slack; Google didn’t respond to requests for comment.

For Carolyn Guss, 44 years old, coronavirus sped up her long held dream of living in the mountains—something she thought wouldn’t happen until her children, 8 and 10, were in college.

“I had this idea in my head that the Bay Area is the center of the tech universe and if you don’t live in the Bay Area, you can’t really progress your career,” said Ms. Guss, a vice president of marketing for a software company.

In March, she drove with her family to their condo in Park City, Utah, to ride out the pandemic. They soon realized they didn’t want to leave. The lack of commute, affordability of housing, access to ski slopes and Utah’s lower tax rate all argued in favor of making the move permanent, she said.

One day, the CEO of Ms. Guss’s company asked if she was still in Park City. When she said yes, her boss asked why she’d bother coming back.

“I said, ‘Well that’s funny you should mention that,’” said Ms. Guss.

Her company approved her request to make her relocation permanent, and she and her husband bought a home in Park City that’s twice the size of the house they owned in Burlingame, Calif. for the same price. Their old house had a garage so small they didn’t park their car in it. The garage in the new one fits four cars.

When Ms. Guss and her husband listed their California home, which sold for under asking, their real-estate agent said people were eager to buy homes with yards outside of San Francisco proper. Would-be buyers expressed interest, but there was a catch: Too many people were trying to sell in San Francisco. During the first week of August, property listings in the city of San Francisco were up 96% compared with the same week last year, according to Zillow.

“We realized they couldn’t sell their place in San Francisco,” said Ms. Guss. “When did you ever think that you would say the sentence, ‘Yeah, I can’t sell my place in S.F.’?”

14-Aug-2020 11:18:28

ATHENS, Aug 14 (Reuters) - A Greek and a Turkish warship were involved in a mini-collision on Wednesday during a standoff in the eastern Mediterranean, a Greek defence source said, describing it as an "accident".

Tensions have risen this week after Turkey sent a survey vessel to the region, escorted by warships, to map out sea territory for possible oil and gas drilling - an area where Turkey and Greece both claim jurisdiction. EU foreign ministers were due to discuss the issue on Friday.

The Turkish Oruc Reis survey ship has been moving between Cyprus and the Greek island of Crete, shadowed by a number of Greek frigates. On Wednesday one of them, the Limnos, was approaching the survey vessel when it came into the path of one of its Turkish naval escorts, the Kemal Reis.

The Greek frigate manoeuvred to avoid a head-on collision and in the process its bow touched the rear of the Turkish frigate, the defence source said.

"It was an accident," the source said, adding the Limnos was not damaged. It subsequently took part in a joint military exercise with France off Crete on Thursday morning.

There was no immediate comment on the incident from the Turkish ministry of defence.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday that any attack on a Turkish ship exploring for oil and gas in disputed Mediterranean waters would incur a "high price" and suggested Turkey had already acted on that warning.

"We said that if you attack our Oruc Reis you will pay a high price, and they got their first answer today," Erdogan said in a speech in Ankara, without giving details.

Greece and Turkey are allies in NATO but their relations have long been fraught with tension. Disputes have ranged from boundaries of offshore continental shelves and airspace to the ethnically split island of Cyprus. In 1996 they almost went to war over ownership of uninhabited islets in the Aegean Sea.

Sophia Lewis’s career was on the rise. Then she began telling her bosses about questionable sales practices. ‘Things started going downhill.’

Sophia Lewis thought she would build a long career at American Express Co. A few years in, though, she was telling her bosses that something was wrong.

Ms. Lewis said she saw some AmEx AXP -1.24% employees routinely submit corporate card applications without verifying the companies’ financial information, pocketing commissions each time. Beginning in 2018, Ms. Lewis said, she alerted higher-ups about those complaints. But AmEx, she said, had created a culture where employees can get rewarded for breaking rules.

“It was when I started raising red flags,” she said, “that things started going downhill.” The company suspended her in February for reasons it said are unrelated to her complaints. Other current and former employees said they saw the same behavior that Ms. Lewis described.

An AmEx spokesman said the company, based in New York, is committed to fostering a culture of respect and integrity, and provides multiple channels for employees to raise concerns. “We encourage our colleagues to speak up when they believe our policies, values or standards are not being upheld, and we strictly prohibit retaliation,” he said.

In the race for customers, AmEx has relied heavily on commissions to motivate salespeople. More than a dozen current and former AmEx employees in sales, customer service and compliance previously told The Wall Street Journal that salespeople strong-armed small-business owners to increase those card sign-ups, sometimes misrepresenting card rewards or issuing cards that weren’t sought. An AmEx spokesman said at the time that the company had found only a very small number of problems, which were resolved “promptly and appropriately,” including through disciplinary action.

Banking regulators have kept a close eye on sales incentives since the Wells Fargo & Co. fake-accounts scandal exploded in 2016. According to an internal 2018 AmEx document, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency told AmEx to change how it paid employees who sold small-business and corporate cards—the division where Ms. Lewis works. The regulator said AmEx’s commission structure could increase the risk of misconduct.

An OCC spokesman declined to comment. An AmEx spokesman said the matter was raised by the OCC in 2017 and that the company addressed it.

In response to Ms. Lewis’s allegations, the AmEx spokesman said that her higher-ups had properly referred her concerns to “our independent investigatory teams.” He said the claims “were thoroughly reviewed and appropriately addressed” and that “no instances of customer harm were identified.”

Ms. Lewis, now 50 years old, joined AmEx’s Phoenix office in 2014 to sell small-business cards. She had worked for years selling mortgages.

By 2017, she was promoted to oversee a group of about 10 employees selling small-business and corporate cards.

In 2018, Ms. Lewis said, some of her employees told her about what they believed to be problems with certain salespeople on another team.

For a business to be eligible for a corporate card, it typically needed at least $4 million in annual revenue, according to current and former employees and company documents.

Ms. Lewis and other current and former employees said some salespeople were submitting applications without verifying their numbers. Many of the businesses fell far short of the $4 million threshold, they said.

Ms. Lewis told a sales director about what she and her employees were seeing, and AmEx launched an investigation.

The AmEx spokesman said that the company may make exceptions to the $4 million threshold, and that it is only one factor used to determine whether a business qualifies for a corporate card. “All applicants undergo a thorough risk assessment to determine their creditworthiness,” he said.

The spokesman also said that AmEx “found no violations of policies or procedures” when it reviewed Ms. Lewis’s claims.

The questionable applications typically wouldn’t get approved if underwriting employees reviewed them. But some did, and salespeople pocketed commissions either way, often about $475 to $650 per application, Ms. Lewis and former employees said.

Soon, in Ms. Lewis’s unit, AmEx changed commissions for corporate cards to pay them after the cards were approved and used. The AmEx spokesman said the company regularly reviews and modifies sales incentives, in part to reduce circumstances that could lead to inappropriate sales practices. He said the 2018 change was made “to better align with business objectives.”

After the AmEx investigation into Ms. Lewis’s claims about sales practices, she applied for several positions and didn’t get them.

In July 2019, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging racial and gender discrimination. Ms. Lewis, who is Black, said she was also frustrated about not getting promoted.

The EEOC forwarded her complaint to the Arizona attorney general’s office, which closed her case last month, citing insufficient evidence. Ms. Lewis is appealing.

The AmEx spokesman said the company had “found no basis for” Ms. Lewis’s allegations of discrimination. “We are deeply committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace,” he said.

Spokespeople for the EEOC and the Arizona attorney general declined to comment.

Around mid-2019, Ms. Lewis said, her salespeople told her that some employees in Arizona and Florida were again engaging in the questionable tactics she had previously flagged, including not verifying companies’ financial information. By then, AmEx had returned to paying commissions for applications—though now it could claw back the money if underwriters rejected them.

Ms. Lewis again alerted her bosses. In October, for example, she emailed several sales leaders, citing about a dozen examples of what she saw as problematic sales, according to a copy of the email reviewed by the Journal. In one case, a salesperson had submitted a corporate card application for a Greenbelt, Md., financial-services firm without including verifying documents and while using a corporate ID number related to Apple Inc. The financial-services firm isn’t related to the technology giant.

When asked about the exchanges that Ms. Lewis described, the AmEx spokesman said: “When the employee raised concerns of potential sales practice violations, they were properly referred by her leaders to our independent investigatory teams outside of her business unit, thoroughly reviewed and appropriately addressed.”

A few days later, Ms. Lewis was told by email that two of those sales leaders had met with “internal audit,” which was looking into the matter.

A week later, Ms. Lewis said, she was called into a sales leader’s office, where she was told to consider how she was affecting her “brand” and whether she wanted to remain at AmEx, Ms. Lewis said. He followed up with an email saying she wasn’t supposed to conduct her own investigations, according to a copy of the email reviewed by the Journal.

Ms. Lewis replied that she thought she was doing the right thing by bringing problems to leadership, according to a copy of the email reviewed by the Journal.

Ms. Lewis said she struggled over what to do next. Her husband encouraged her to press on. So did her mother.

In December, Ms. Lewis filed a Labor Department complaint. A Labor Department spokeswoman didn’t comment on Ms. Lewis’s case.

In February, Ms. Lewis was placed on a three-day paid suspension. The AmEx spokesman said she broke information-security policies by sending confidential company information to her personal email address.

Ms. Lewis said she did nothing wrong. She said she had sent an email to her personal account with information about a problematic sales call. She said she had also forwarded an email that she had written about sales problems to her personal account.

Ms. Lewis didn’t want to go back to the office. Exhausted and unnerved, she said, she filed for stress-related paid sick leave. AmEx granted it.

A couple of weeks later, Ms. Lewis learned that her performance rating for 2019 had plummeted. She doesn’t know why. During the first three quarters of 2019, Ms. Lewis was a top performer among small-business and corporate card sales managers, according to a company document.

Ms. Lewis said she tried to negotiate with AmEx through the Labor Department. She wanted to return, but only if her performance rating is revised. AmEx, she said, has declined.

Trump administration expects seizures will deter shipping companies from dealing with Iran and Venezuela

The Trump administration has for the first time confiscated cargo in vessels allegedly loaded with Iran fuel in violation of sanctions, U.S. officials said, as it steps up its campaign of maximum pressure against Tehran.

Last month U.S. federal prosecutors filed suit to seize the four tankers of gasoline that Iran was sending to Venezuela, the latest move in the administration’s effort to stifle flows of goods and money helping to keep two of its top foes in power.

At the time, it was unclear if U.S. authorities would successfully be able to take control of the tankers, after a similar effort to seize Iranian fuel through a U.S. forfeiture case was unsuccessful last year.

One official said the vessels had been taken over without the use of military force but didn’t provide any details. Last year the U.S. tried unsuccessfully to use judicial cooperation agreements to take control of an Iranian oil vessel that had been detained in the British territory of Gibraltar.

The administration expects the seizures will deter shipping companies from dealing with the Iranians and Venezuelans as tanker owners, brokers, insurers and other businesses see the risk as too costly, senior U.S. officials said. Iran and Venezuela must increasingly rely on the private sector—or illegal markets—to carry the oil and energy products vital to both nations’ ailing economies as Washington’s pressure campaigns have crippled the ability of state-owned fleets to ship supplies.

The four vessels—Luna, Pandi, Bering and Bella—were seized at sea in recent days and are now en route to Houston, the officials said. Senior administration officials are expected to meet the tankers in the coming days at an event scheduled to mark the docking, the officials said. A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

A federal judge in Washington last week gave the U.S. title to the Grace 1, saying that federal prosecutors had provided enough evidence that the tanker and its fuel were assets of a designated terrorist organization. The tanker had been released from Gibraltar in August 2019 over U.S. objections.

The Bering and the Bella were sailing off Cape Verde when the forfeiture complaint was filed in July, U.S. officials have previously said. The Luna and the Pandi last sent a radio signal from Omani waters a month ago, according to the shipping database FleetMon.

The four vessels were originally part of a flotilla of nine tankers, including five Iranian vessels, which were escorted by an Iranian naval intelligence ship, according to U.S. officials. The four privately owned vessels began peeling off from the flotilla after U.S. authorities contacted the owners of the ships, those officials said.

The U.S. government’s lawsuit alleges that an Iranian businessman affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s elite military unit designated by the U.S. as a terror group, arranged the fuel deliveries through a network of shell companies to avoid detection and evade U.S. sanctions.

The action is the latest in a series of moves the U.S. has taken against Iran and its ally Venezuela as part of a broad operation to pressure the governments in Tehran and Caracas to meet U.S. demands.

The lawsuit came after diplomatic overtures and public and private warnings to companies involved in the shipping sector regarding the ramifications of dealing with Iran and Venezuela. The U.S. pressure campaign has resulted in plummeting energy exports for both countries, analysts say.

Iran’s and Venezuela’s leaders said they are planning more deliveries, with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro announcing plans to secure a deal on a planned trip to Tehran, but the Trump administration’s efforts have taken a toll. U.S. containment of Iran’s shipping industry over the past two years helped cut the country’s crude exports from around 2.5 million barrels a day to an estimated 70,000 in April.

Senior U.S. officials said that besides jetting around the world warning governments against helping Iran, they have conducted a broad outreach to the tanker industry, including insurance companies and firms that provide shipping licenses required under international maritime laws. That effort, along with official warnings published by the U.S. Treasury, sparked many companies to carry out a review of the transactions on their books, according to government and industry officials.

According to people familiar with the matter and Wall Street Journal research, the four seized vessels are tied to a network of companies owned or managed by Giorgios Gialozoglou and his son, Marios. The Bering captain, the Cape Verde justice ministry and Marios Gialozoglou didn’t respond to requests for comment. The phone numbers for the other vessels couldn’t be determined.

Giorgios and Marios Gialozoglou manage or own a network of Piraeus, Greece-based companies with more than a dozen other fuel and oil tankers, according to corporate registry data. According to ship-tracking data and industry officials, several of those vessels have recently conducted multiple ship-to-ship transfers and recorded long gaps in transponder data, activities that the U.S. Treasury said in a March sanctions advisory that the shipping industry should see as red flags for possible sanctions evasion. Another ship was held by Saudi-backed Yemen authorities concerned about a delivery of fuel to the Iran-backed Houthis.

In one of the few other such efforts that was successful, U.S. authorities seized in May 2019 a North Korean ship they allege the government in Pyongyang used to transport coal in violation of U.S. and international sanctions. It was the first such U.S. action against North Korea for sanctions violations.

Satya Nadella won praise for taking it easy with new acquisitions like LinkedIn but is likely to have to move faster with the video-sharing app

For Microsoft Corp. MSFT -0.23% Chief Executive Satya Nadella, completing an acquisition of TikTok’s U.S. business could pose a new challenge: How to reshape a just-bought business quickly, without damaging its successful formula.

Mr. Nadella typically has taken a light-touch approach in Microsoft’s biggest acquisitions. After the software giant shelled out $26 billion on LinkedIn in 2016, it took years to integrate the business, in part to avoid disrupting the culture that had made the business-focused networking startup a success.

“This is not about changing the core of LinkedIn,” Mr. Nadella said at the time of the takeover. He largely repeated the strategy two years later with Microsoft’s $7.5 billion acquisition of developer collaboration platform GitHub Inc.

Sticking to that script with TikTok could be harder, though, if Microsoft prevails in its bid to buy parts of the video-sharing app from Beijing-based parent ByteDance Ltd. amid pressure from the Trump administration over security concerns.

President Trump last week signed an executive order that would take effect in September and effectively bar American transactions with TikTok’s owner, including possibly downloads of the app, unless the U.S. business is sold. The administration’s position is that TikTok poses an economic and national-security threat to U.S. interests. TikTok disputes it poses such a risk and said it would challenge the order.

Microsoft has promised the U.S. government it would address the security concerns and ensure that data on the more than 100 million American users would be held only in the U.S. That is a contrast to Microsoft’s typical take-it-slowly integration approach, said Robert Majek, a research analyst at Raymond James & Associates.

“What I think Microsoft will do with TikTok is, at the beginning, throw as much resources as it can [at the integration] to get them on their feet, and then get out of the way,” he said.

To address U.S. security concerns, industry officials have said Microsoft, or any other buyer, would have to rewrite TikTok’s software to ensure people working on the app’s legacy operations couldn’t access the U.S. data.

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has urged Microsoft not to rely on ByteDance employees, who might be affiliated with the China’s Communist Party, in the transition, expressing concern they could potentially add “back doors” for data access. TikTok has said it would never share American user data with Chinese authorities.

Microsoft has set a mid-September deadline for the deal that would also include TikTok operations in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It declined to comment on how it might integrate the business. Mr. Trump has said a buyer also could acquire all of TikTok. Microsoft hasn’t said whether it would consider a complete purchase.

Changing its takeover approach may be uncomfortable for Microsoft, given that it struggled with acquisitions before Mr. Nadella became CEO in 2014. The company spent $7.2 billion on Nokia Corp.’s mobile-phone business in 2013, only to take a $7.6 billion write-off on the deal two years later. Similarly, after buying advertising technology company aQuantive for $6.3 billion in 2007, Microsoft wrote off almost the entire value five years later.

With LinkedIn, Mr. Nadella deployed a hands-off approach to integrating the business. It was only last year that Microsoft began moving LinkedIn onto its cloud, and LinkedIn’s CEO still reports directly to Mr. Nadella. The integration was so light that LinkedIn’s staff rarely noticed they were part of a tech giant, a former employee who lived through the transition said.

LinkedIn and Microsoft initially integrated their systems mainly on the surface, for example by allowing LinkedIn profile information to show up in Microsoft Office 365 applications such as email. Those features would have been possible even if Microsoft hadn’t bought LinkedIn, said Rob Helm, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a consulting firm that helps companies integrate with the software giant’s products.

The hands-off takeover strategy has shown success. LinkedIn and GitHub have registered strong user growth, although some analysts have questioned whether Microsoft maximized the value of those acquisitions.

When Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, the network had 433 million registered users with growth slowing. For the most recent quarter, Microsoft said LinkedIn had more than 706 million users, and sales have roughly doubled since the purchase.

GitHub, which now reports into Microsoft’s cloud-computing group, has increased user numbers to more than 50 million from 28 million at the time of its acquisition.

“An absolute key lesson from the LinkedIn and GitHub acquisitions is to leave it alone,” said Alex Zukin, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “Keep the team together and give them support, but let them run for at least a year or two. Don’t do anything that could jeopardize that.”

The LinkedIn experience also has shown how Microsoft has been able to navigate political issues with Beijing—an area that is again in the spotlight, as U.S. pressure to force a sale of TikTok has been poorly received in China. Microsoft has allowed some content on LinkedIn, as well as search engine Bing, to be censored in China to address local concerns.

Still, to some, Mr. Nadella’s approach has failed to make the most of businesses he has bought.

“They haven’t fully realized the value of LinkedIn,” said Ray Wang, founder of the Silicon Valley-based advisory firm Constellation Research Inc. “LinkedIn on its own is awesome, but Microsoft doesn’t seem to know how to use it other than selling ads.”

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