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The Financial Conduct Authority has launched an investigation into Cobham over its handling of inside information ahead of one of its many profit warnings over the last year.

The defence equipment company’s shares plunged 20 per cent last April, when the company revealed 2016 profits would be £15m below expectations, and announced a £500m rescue rights issue. The announcement was made less than two months after the group’s then chief executive, Bob Murphy, had told investors at the annual results in early March that he expected a flat performance for 2016.

Cobham said on Monday that it had been informed by a phone call that the FCA’s Enforcement division was investigating how inside information had been handled in the weeks ahead of the April profit warning.

It does not appear that Cobham directors sold any shares in the period between the announcement of annual results on March 3 and the April 26 statement. However, companies are obliged to publish material information as soon as possible, in order to avoid a false market being made in the shares. In general, in the UK this means at the start of the next trading session.

In June 2015, the FCA imposed a £4.6m fine on Asia Resources, the mining company formerly known as Bumi, for a number of breaches in the disclosure of material information, including related party transactions. The company was also found to have failed to “establish and maintain adequate procedures, systems and controls to enable it to comply with its obligations”. Photo-me, the photo booth operator, was fined £500,000 in 2010 for failing to “disclose inside information to the market as soon as possible and to avoid the creation or continuation of a false market in listed securities”.

The investigation is yet another setback for Cobham investors, who have suffered five profit warnings, and have been asked to subscribe to a second £500m rescue rights issue.

A new management team, led by chief executive David Lockwood, was put in place at the start of the year after investors demanded the departure of both Mr Murphy and the former chairman John Devaney.

The company earlier this month announced a sharply higher pre-tax loss £847.9m for last year, compared with £39.8m for 2015, and warned there would be no dividend this year.

Amazon Delays Convenience Store Opening to Work Out Kinks

Cashier-less shop must fix glitches in technology that automatically charges customers

Amazon.com Inc. is delaying the public opening of its first cashier-less convenience store because of technical complications.

Amazon Go was due to launch to the public by the end of the month, after launching in beta mode to employees in December, according to people familiar with the matter. It is unclear when it will now open, as it works out kinks in the technology to automatically charge customers when they leave, instead of needing to have cash registers, checkouts and lines.

The store in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle uses cameras, sensors and algorithms to watch customers and track what they pick up, according to the people. But Amazon has run into problems tracking more than about 20 people in the store at one time, as well as the difficulty of keeping tabs on an item if it has been moved from its specific spot on the shelf, according to the people.

For now, the technology functions flawlessly only if there are a small number of customers present, or when their movements are slow, the people said. The store will continue to need employees to help ensure the technology is accurately tracking purchases for the near future.

Amazon declined to comment. It previously said that the store would open to the public in “early 2017.” Bloomberg earlier reported that the technology has been crashing in tests when the store gets too crowded.

The setbacks with Amazon Go highlight the difficulty the online retail giant faces in modernizing brick-and-mortar retail. Amazon is exploring chains of book, convenience and grocery stores to challenge its rivals on all fronts. But it has little experience in anticipating and managing the flow of customers and products in a physical space.

Amazon has already opened five bookstores, with another five announced, according to its website. It also has about 30 mall pop-up stores, and two drive-up grocery pickup store locations in Seattle are expected to open soon.

Brick-and-mortar stores are key to Amazon’s plan to capture more food sales, opening the door to a key driver of consumer spending and broadening the online retailer’s influence. It would help it better compete against rivals like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which is building out its own grocery pick-up strategy.

While the Amazon Go store is still working out kinks, the company is already envisioning future hires to work on expansion across multiple sites, according to several job postings for the concept on its site last week.

Amazon Go testing started at a mock-up store in a warehouse in the SoDo neighborhood in Seattle before the first store’s beta opening on the ground floor of an Amazon building. Employees were the guinea pigs for the technology, which relies on video streaming and computer vision algorithms to process images in real-time, along with sensors, identifying customers and tracking them—and the items they grab—throughout the store. The retailer has said it uses technology similar to an autonomous car to make the process work.

Three months ago, Amazon announced its Go concept with a video showing customers scanning their phones on a kiosk as they walk in. After they leave the store, Amazon charges their account for the items and sends a receipt.

But if there are more than about 20 people in the store, the system can start to malfunction, making it increasingly difficult to track where people are and what they are picking up, the people said. That’s a hindrance to the public opening of Amazon Go, which the company expects will generate big crowds, one of the people said.

The project, part of a deeper effort to reevaluate the future of brick-and-mortar retail, is being led by Steve Kessel. The senior vice president, who reports directly to CEO Jeff Bezos, previously helped create the Kindle e-readers.

On a recent weekday, a handful of Amazon employees at a time were browsing in the store, scanning their phones at turnstiles as they entered, then picking out items, heading back to an area with utensils and condiments, before walking out without paying.

Some who have shopped there said it feels odd to walk out of the store without stopping to pay.

Le Monde reveals how Israeli espionage agency allegedly exploited a successful chemical weapons operation to get French counterparts to become sources; former head of French counterintelligence agency being questioned as suspect in case.

PARIS – An internal report written by French intelligence, parts of which were published in the daily newspaper Le Monde on Sunday, reveal efforts by the Mossad to develop relationships with French spies, “to the point of crossing the line of turning them into double agents.”

The audit report recommends investigating Bernard Squarcini, the head of the General Directorate for Internal Security until 2012, on suspicion of maintaining unauthorized and unreported ties with the Mossad’s Paris bureau chief at the time (identified in the report only by his initials, D.K.).

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The background to all this was a joint operation launched by the Mossad and French counterintelligence agency in 2010 to collect intelligence about Syrian President Bashar Assad’s chemical warfare plans. The operation, code-named Ratafia, aimed to recruit a senior Syrian engineer, who was meant to come to France to do additional training in chemistry and also to help recruit other engineers.

The Mossad and French agents would hold work meetings using assumed names, as is customary. The French agents, who belonged to three different counterintelligence units, were responsible for the operation in Paris, while the Mossad agents were responsible for the plot that would enable the Syrian target to leave the country for studies and to recruit others in the French capital.

But according to the report, the Israelis exploited the operation to persuade an unknown number of French agents to also serve as intelligence sources for Israel.

In addition, according to the report, suspicious sums of money were deposited in the bank accounts of those French agents who were involved in the Ratafia operation.

The internal report calls for further investigation to understand what damage was done to the French intelligence service.

Le Monde also published details about the Ratafia operation. The paper claimed that the Mossad succeeded in recruiting the Syrian engineer and extracted information from him about Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal.

The French daily said the operation enabled Israel to prove that the scientific cooperation between the European Union and Syria was being used to boost Assad’s chemical weapons program, which led to the cancellation of the agreement with the Syrians in 2011.

According to Le Monde, the Mossad’s interest in building relations with French spies was exposed because a different French espionage agency, responsible for information security, was keeping the agents under surveillance and photographed them with Mossad agents.

The paper said that all the Mossad agents involved were identified by their real names. The French filed a formal complaint, and two Israeli diplomats in the Israeli Embassy in Paris left their posts and returned to Israel. The Mossad chief, D.K., also returned to Israel following the French complaint.

According to the report, the two Mossad agents suspected of contacts with the French have left the service and are now private businessmen in Tel Aviv. But during 2016, the report noted, they made contact with Squarcini (the counterintelligence head they’d worked with) in Paris.

Squarcini, who is now being questioned as a suspect in the case, told investigators he met the two “totally by chance.”

A short time before the suspicions came to light, Squarcini himself launched an internal inquiry into whether the Mossad was trying to recruit French agents as sources. However, the agents he put under surveillance did not include those involved in the Ratafia operation, even though Squarcini was fully aware of the close ties that had developed between his people and the Mossad operatives, the report said.

An investigating judge appointed by the French filed an official request with Israel to question the two ex-Mossad agents who made contact with Squarcini in 2016. It isn’t clear if he received a response.

The judge is seeking to build on the internal investigative report and broaden the investigation into whether the Mossad infiltrated French intelligence under Squarcini.

read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.779644

The Wall Street bank, which has already banked a cool $1 billion profit with its early stage investment in Israeli car tech company Mobileye, lost out on nearly doubling that gain when it sold off its stake in the company to comply with the Volcker Rule, sources said.

Goldman Sachs will get to earn a little of that “lost” profit back now that it has been hired by Mobileye to act as an adviser on its $15 billion sale to Intel, The Post has learned.

The hiring was made in recent days, sources said.

Previously, Mobileye was working only with investment bank Raymond James.

Goldman made most of its $1 billion profit soon after it helped take Mobileye public in 2014 at $25 a share — then the largest US initial public offering of an Israeli company.

A the time of the IPO, Goldman owned roughly 17.5 percent of the company, whose computer chips and cameras alert cars to brake to avoid hitting other cars and pedestrians, thanks to an early $130 million investment in the company — and a followup 2013 investment.

The first investment came in 2007, just as Mobileye’s technology was getting into cars and when it needed the cash to survive.

But the firm had to sell its shares, owned through Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, its private-equity fund, to comply with 2013’s Volcker Rule, which restricts banks from making speculative bets with its own money.

Partly as a result of the Volcker Rule, Goldman, around 2015, sold all its Mobileye shares, netting a roughly $1 billion profit, two sources said.

If it didn’t have to sell the stake, Mobileye’s fast-rising stock price would have handed Goldman another nearly $1 billion profit when it agreed to be bought this month by Intel, sources said.

“They were the only institution that funded them in the financial crisis,” a source said. At the time, Mobileye had a reported $600 million valuation.

It is now worth $13.5 billion.

Mobileye shares at the end of 2015 traded at $35.98 a share. Intel is paying $63.54 per share for the company.

Mobileye is coveted because of the role it is likely to play not only in today’s cars — as it helps drivers to avoid accidents — but in driverless cars.

The company has retained Goldman for the Intel sale even though it has already signed a deal because it wants to reward the bank for its help over the years, a source said.

Goldman declined to comment.