As the board prepares to meet next week, tensions are mounting between Credit Suisse Chairman Urs Rohner and Chief Executive Officer Tidjane Thiam in the wake of an embarrassing scandal that triggered a regulatory probe into the bank’s culture and management.

Rohner is preparing a list of possible successors to Thiam, according to people familiar with the matter. At the same time, Thiam’s allies have urged Rohner to depart on schedule next year when his term as chairman ends, the people said.

David Herro, deputy chairman at Harris Associates — one of Credit Suisse’s top investors — said in an email that he wants Thiam to stay and that the board will be seeking a replacement for Rohner in 2021 “as per best practice.”

The drama reflects the aftershocks of an episode that rocked the bank last year when it emerged that a top Thiam lieutenant hired spies to track former wealth management head Iqbal Khan. While Credit Suisse called the incident an isolated event, it turned out that the aide, Pierre-Olivier Bouee, also ordered surveillance of former human resources head Peter Goerke.

“The story has no factual basis and is rejected by Credit Suisse,” according to a statement from the Zurich-based bank.

Credit Suisse shares fell as much as 1.3% after the report, sliding to 12.26 francs a share at 4:15 p.m. in Zurich, the lowest lowest since Nov. 1.

An investigation by Swiss law firm Homburger concluded Bouee acted alone, clearing Thiam and prompting Rohner to issue a public apology for the spying, testing a long-standing partnership between the chairman and his CEO. The revelations that followed about the culture at Credit Suisse are adding up — from outbursts by senior managers in Zurich to further disclosures about Thiam’s rift with Khan. Now Bouee is reported by Swiss media to be exploring legal options after being terminated for cause and therefore losing about $4 million in bonuses.

Thiam, who was hired by Rohner in 2015, won shareholder support for stabilizing the franchise by scaling back trading and bolstering wealth management. But while costs have been slashed and the balance sheet strengthened, Credit Suisse stock has lost almost half its value since he took over.

Rohner is working on a plan to replace Thiam, according to a person familiar with his thinking. Emergency and mid-term succession planning for Thiam is in place, though, and no imminent change is expected, according to a another person. As for the chairman’s role, shareholders have asked board members to work on succession within its ranks and find a chairman that works well with the management.

Thiam’s future atop the Swiss bank could ultimately hinge on whether financial regulator Finma decides he’s unfit to retain the position after the spying scandals. Finma has appointed an auditor to review corporate governance and internal communications among executives, a process than can take several months.

Until then, Herro sees no reason to replace Thiam.

“This is no reason to change a successful CEO as he has not been implicated in any wrongdoing,” he said.

While details and the timeline of any leadership changes are still fluid, Rohner plans to step down in April 2021 at the end of his 12-year term, according to people familiar with the matter.

Khan, who was once mentioned as a potential successor to Thiam, has since settled into a top post at UBS Group. But that hasn’t stopped the public spat. The latest twist came in a report that Thiam asked Khan to collect “dirty material” on an executive who criticized him. Thiam took to Instagram to reject the “entirely false and defamatory” reports.

Exxon appeared to defy investor demands for financial discipline and heftier returns by outspending cash flow for the eighth time in 10 quarters. Meanwhile, U.S. rival Chevron registered its steepest loss in a decade due to the shrinking value of North American natural gas fields and weakening performance at overseas refineries and oil projects.

The pain is far from over: Exxon Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods warned that conditions in its chemical business will continue to be “challenging” through 2020 and predicted the worldwide glut of natural gas will take some time to burn off.

Big Oil is at a critical juncture as investors increasingly fret about the role of fossil fuels in warming the planet. For shareholders, one of the only reasons to own stock in companies like Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron is dividends, and confidence in those is undermined by weak quarterly results.

Shares of both U.S. companies plunged as trading opened in New York, with Exxon dropping more than 4% to the lowest since 2010. Chevron slid the most in almost four months. The results were presaged by Shell’s gloomy earnings report on Thursday that prompted the European supermajor to slow share buybacks.

Exxon’s $35 billion-a-year rebuild of its upstream portfolio is swallowing up so much cash that the company is unable to consistently pay dividends from cash flow, leaning heavily on asset sales and borrowing to fund the payout.

Perhaps more ominous for Exxon is that the Permian Basin that was seen as one of the company’s future profit engines is showing signs of trouble. The company’s oil output in the region continued to grow in the fourth quarter, but at a slower pace than before. Meanwhile, its Permian gas output dropped.

The supermajor’s fourth-quarter capital spending exceeded analysts’ estimates by 36%, demonstrating Exxon’s commitment to a raft of new oil and natural gas investments. Excluding the $3.7 billion sale of its Norwegian assets, per-share earnings were 41 cents, the lowest since 2016.

The $355 million loss in chemicals was the first negative return for that business since 2006, according to RBC Capital Markets.

“We expect the market reaction to be negative to this set of results today,” RBC analyst Biraj Borkhataria said in a note to clients. “This leaves the company’s dividend completely uncovered by organic cash flow for another quarter.”

Exxon’s Woods is facing plunging margins in oil refining and chemicals at a time when crude prices have stagnated and natural gas is in free-fall. Refining margins shrank in Europe and Asia while chemical prices are tumbling due to an “unprecedented level” of supply addition, according to Wood Mackenzie Ltd.

Gas makes up almost nearly 40% of Exxon’s overall production. In the U.S., the fuel is trading close to its 1990s lows, while prices for liquefied cargoes heading for Asia have tumbled almost 50% in the past year.

As for Chevron, most of its fourth-quarter loss stemmed from $10.4 billion in previously announced impairments. Profit from the company’s international downstream and upstream divisions also sank.

Chevron Chief Executive Officer Mike Wirth is differentiating the oil explorer from some of its biggest rivals by funding heftier shareholder payouts and buybacks with cash rather than borrowed money.

Though concrete estimates on the financial toll of the coronavirus outbreak are still scarce, signs are emerging that the final cost will far outweigh that of the 2003 SARS epidemic, when China’s auto market was one-sixth the size it is today and smaller than that of Japan. Companies from Tesla to Volkswagen and Toyota have warned they anticipate disruptions, while a top parts supplier predicted automakers will cut China production 15% this quarter.

China’s car sales were already heading for the lowest in at least five years before the current outbreak forced authorities to lock down the epicenter of Wuhan city and beyond. Now, it’s unclear when consumers will come back to showrooms as 14 provinces and cities that accounted for almost 70% of the country’s gross domestic product shut businesses and factories until at least the second week of February.

“The risks are enormous because of the sheer weight of China in the global market and its importance to trade,” said Jean-Louis Sempe, a Paris-based analyst at Invest Securities. “Predicting the seriousness of the epidemic is very difficult, but there’s no doubt the impact could be huge on factories, supply chains and domestic car sales.”

Should passenger-vehicle sales in China fall 20% from last year’s 21.4 million units, that would threaten to end the country’s run as the world’s largest auto market, a rank it’s held for more than a decade.

General Motors and Honda are among the manufacturers with factories in the Wuhan region, while state-owned Dongfeng Motor Corp. is headquartered in the city of about 11 million people.

Nissan and Peugeot-maker PSA Group also have assembly plants in Wuhan or the broader Hubei province and are partners with Dongfeng. Robin Zhu, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., singled out Dongfeng PSA as “by far the most exposed” because of the high proportion of vehicles it makes in the area.

“Investors will need to brace for a slowdown in broader activity levels in China,” Zhu said in a Jan. 27 note. “We expect the Chinese auto industry to endure a traumatic next few months.”

Automakers probably will dial back production by 15% in China this quarter after extending holiday shutdowns because of the virus, supplier Aptiv said Thursday. Aptiv, whose customers include GM and Volkswagen, expects its own production to be down 11% from a year ago.

The government extended the annual Lunar New Year holiday break — with its workplace closures — by several days to curb potential exposure. Tesla was among the companies saying they’re monitoring potential supply-chain interruptions for cars built outside China, as well.

“This will be horrendous in the supply chain, it’s going to be awful for companies and it will show in their quarterly reports and global strategy going forward,” said Rosemary Coates, a supply chain consultant and executive director of the Reshoring Institute, a non-profit focused on expanding manufacturing in the U.S. “It’s going to show and it’s going to hurt.”

The epidemic comes at a delicate time for the car industry, which faces sales slumps also beyond China, and pressure to make heavy investments in electric and self-driving cars. Compounding the danger for automakers is the overall economic slowdown, with the virus potentially shaving more than 1 percentage point off first-quarter growth in China’s gross domestic product.

China also is the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles. The demand for EVs and traditional premium models will suffer the most because sales of those vehicles are concentrated in the biggest cities, which happen to be the ones most affected by the epidemic, Zhu said.

The effect is felt far beyond the Wuhan region. Tesla expects a potential 10-day delay in production ramp-up at its new Shanghai plant — its first outside the U.S. — because of the government-required shutdown. Chief Financial Officer Zach Kirkhorn said Jan. 29 the delay may also “slightly impact” the company’s profitability this quarter.

GM, Toyota and Volkswagen also closed their plants at least through Feb. 9, taking heed from several provinces that advised companies not to resume operations any sooner than the extended holiday break.

Each month of lost production in China would erode operating profit by about 6.1% at Honda and 11% at Nissan, JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimates. The Chinese operations of Japan-based Aisin Seiki Co. and Koito Manufacturing Co. are among the most exposed to a production stoppage, JPMorgan said in a Jan. 30 note.

In Germany, Wuhan’s links to the global industry were driven home this week when auto-parts supplier Webasto shut its headquarters in the Munich suburb of Stockdorf after at least four staff members became infected following the visit of a Chinese colleague.

Fears about the virus are pressuring foreign governments to repatriate their nationals, and many auto companies have helped with the effort. PSA, Honda and Nissan are evacuating expatriates and their families from the Wuhan area. Most also put limits on travel into China.

While industries such as textiles are able to relocate production quickly, the heavy equipment required in carmaking means it could take auto manufacturers two or three years to move a plant, said Reshoring Institute’s Coates.

“Moving an auto plant or any highly machined products or any sophisticated kind of products — it’s just not gonna happen very fast,” she said. “Even a few days of shutting down a major industrial area like Wuhan is going to affect supply chains around the world.”

The document offers a look into Baker’s role in the sale of Hudson’s Bay’s stake in a joint venture with Signa Holding that operates German department stores, as well as his subsequent interactions with the board. Proceeds from the Signa deal were needed to help secure financing for the take-private deal, which will be voted on by shareholders next month.

The additional disclosure was mandated by the Ontario Securities Commission in a ruling last month before Baker and his partners could proceed with their efforts to acquire the remainder of the company they didn’t already own.

It illustrates how Baker and his partners moved forward amid a landscape complicated by the declining fortunes of department stores and intense scrutiny from minority investors. Baker and his partners say the deal will give the company greater flexibility to adapt as consumers migrate away from department stores and to online retailers such as Amazon.com.

The Baker group sweetened its bid this month to roughly C$2 billion ($1.5 billion) and reached a truce with investor Catalyst Capital Group, which had opposed the deal’s original terms and filed a complaint with regulators. At the time, Catalyst voiced concerns about the process, including Baker’s interactions with the board. The new proposal will go to a shareholder vote on Feb. 27.

According to the filing, Baker was part of a group of Hudson’s Bay representatives that began exploratory talks to sell the Canadian retailer’s remaining 50% stake in its venture with Signa during February of last year. Shortly after those discussions began, Baker started talks of his own with other Hudson’s Bay shareholders about potentially using some of the proceeds from the sale to help take the retailer private.

Baker and his partners determined that without the proceeds from the deal with Signa, they would unlikely be able to raise the necessary debt to take Hudson’s Bay private.

In March, Baker informed the board’s lead director, David Leith, of his plans to explore taking Hudson’s Bay private. Leith agreed to share limited financial information to Baker and his partners at that time on a confidential basis before informing other board members the following day.

A special committee of the board was then established to review the Signa deal and other possible transactions. The committee did not include Baker or fellow executive, Ian Putnam, who was part of the group trying to take the company private, the document shows.

“While the special committee was aware that any privatization proposal, if received, would be conditional on the Signa transactions, the Signa transactions were not conditional on a privatization transaction proceeding,” the filing states.

The filing also shows how much Baker, his fellow board members, and management will earn through the sale of their options in the deal. The board will make roughly $26.6 million from the sale, including $8.7 million for Baker and $10.2 million for Chief Executive Officer Helena Foulkes. Baker and the other conflicted directors will roll over their stake in the privatization, the document shows.

The European planemaker admitted guilt and agreed to pay $4 billion in a settlement approved Friday by courts in France, the U.S. and the U.K. According to documents filed in the cases, the crimes spanned countries including Malaysia, Russia and China over 13 years. A French prosecutor said in court that the plan helped to boost the company’s profits by 1.05 billion euros ($1.2 billion).

U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan called the conduct by Airbus employees and executives “pervasive and pernicious” and asked prosecutors whether individuals would be charged. The investigation is ongoing, answered U.S. prosecutor Elina Rubin-Smith. She told the judge that Airbus’s deal requires them to aid any efforts to charge individuals.

“All you can assume is that somehow the Airbus ethics and the philosophy in certain parts of the company simply did not move with the times,” said Sandy Morris, an analyst at Jefferies International. “It’s a long time to be doing things wrong and the scale of this penalty seems to suggest this wasn’t just a handful of examples.”

Airbus will be under scrutiny for the next three years. For the Toulouse, France-based company, the settlement ends four years of investigations into accusations that it used middle men to win over officials with bribes when it entered new markets. It agreed to pay 2.1 billion euros to France, 991 million euros including costs to the U.K. and 527 million euros to American authorities.

While steep, the so-called Deferred Prosecution Agreement frees the aerospace giant to press its advantage over struggling rival Boeing, which remains in crisis almost 1 year after its 737 Max workhorse was grounded because of deadly crashes.

Airbus used the 150-person strategy and marketing department to pay bribes to win business, according to prosecutors in Washington D.C. The company made $50 million in improper payments to AirAsia Group directors through the sponsorship of a sports team, promised to pay off the relative of a high-ranking Ghanaian government official and paid $2 million to the wife of a Sri Lankan Airways purchasing official, according to the U.K. judgment.

The company’s crimes in the U.S. included export violations, the court was told. In the U.K., there were five counts, four relating to commercial aircraft in Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Taiwan while the fifth related to a defense contract.

The wrongdoing first came to light when the U.K.’s export finance body, which supports some Airbus sales, questioned the company about missing information about sales agents contained in its filings, according to the U.K. judgment.

A subsequent review by Airbus included “red flags for corruption,” after which U.K. Export Finance suggested the company reports itself to the SFO, the judgment said.

Then-Chief Executive Officer Tom Enders launched an internal probe, and the European manufacturer turned itself in to authorities in 2016. Investigations into Airbus were subsequently opened in France and the U.S.

The fallout led to the departures of top company executives and dominated the last several years of Enders’s tenure. The fine dents profits but lets CEO Guillaume Faury clear away a major distraction. The company just came out the clear winner in the perennial duopoly battle for plane orders with Boeing, which has struggled with delays as it tries to lift the grounding of the 737 Max, idled since last March.

Faury, who took over in April, will be able to turn his attention to another pressing issue: how to resolve production issues that have led to a massive order backlog and compensation for airlines.

While the company can largely move on, Jean-Francois Bohnert, a prosecutor at France’s Parquet National Financier, said investigations into individuals isn’t over. Authorities still have open probes into former executives and other representatives.

Airbus shares fell 0.9% to 133.24 euros in Paris. The stock is up 2.1% so far this year.

“Airbus is relieved to be here today after having had a rather painful past,” Sylvie Kande de Beaupuy, chief compliance officer at Airbus, said in court in France.

Eric Russo, another French prosecutor, said the probe was helped by the “exceptional cooperation” Airbus provided, handing over 30 million documents — three times the size of the Panama Papers leak.

“We went backstage to examine the largest contracts won by the company,” Russo said.

The total Airbus fine surpasses J&F Investimentos SA’s 2017 penalty of about $3.2 billion, billed the world’s largest bribery settlement at the time.

The U.K. settlement is also the largest ever, surpassing the then record 500 million-pound ($651 million) fine paid by jet-engine maker Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc. Airbus plans to book the fines in its year-end results due on Feb. 13.

Investigators from the Serious Fraud Office scrutinized the use of some middlemen who acted as go-betweens for companies and officials in the Middle East and elsewhere. That led to a sweeping review by Airbus into its controls and practices in 2016.

The European manufacturer isn’t the only company that has been tripped up attempting to manage growth in the Middle East, Asia and other fast-growing regions. Companies often use intermediaries with local connections to help establish a presence in new markets, where setting up local offices can take years. The practice isn’t illegal, but it can complicate oversight.

This week, Facebook hired the director of its oversight board and released material about the review process. Most cases are expected to take 90 days-which the company that gave us the motto “move fast and break things” surely knows is an eternity in the world of the internet.

Facebook has committed $130 million to fund the board, so it can deal with the hardest calls it faces about which content to remove from its site. For political content and misinformation, a board of elders could make a lot of sense, even though it wouldn’t extend to encrypted messages (more on that later).

The company is aware that the public has run out of patience. “We know that the initial reaction to the oversight board and its members will basically be one of cynicism-because basically, the reaction to pretty well anything new that Facebook does is cynical,” said Nick Clegg, its VP of global policy. Sure enough, TechCrunch on Tuesday called the board “toothless.”

I’ll reserve judgment until we see who Facebook has selected as co-chairs. But not all of Facebook’s problems are all that hard to adjudicate. Just this week, BuzzFeed wrote about a woman who struggled to get Facebook to remove an obscene page using her name without success – for four years! The company became suddenly responsive once BuzzFeed joined the cause.

To take a more extreme example, the New York Times reported last year about 45 million pictures of child sexual abuse appearing online in 2018. The investigation pinpointed Facebook Messenger as a place where abusers swap images, including a video of a man sexually assaulting a 6-year old that went viral in the messaging app.

These cases don’t require an oversight board. (And they wouldn’t get one: Messages would be exempt under Facebook’s current proposal.) But there are other enforcement issues here. Facebook’s WhatsApp product already has end-to-end encryption, meaning the company itself can’t see the contents. And now, Facebook has plans to encrypt Messenger as well. Some of those Facebook cynics that Clegg knows are out there might even say the company plans to encrypt away its Messenger moderation conundrum.

Facebook’s official explanation is that encryption increases privacy – a goal its critics say they share. But elected officials are worried about the company’s plans to encrypt Facebook Messenger perhaps even more than they care about privacy.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, along with Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, is working on a bill wrapping in attacks both on encryption and content moderation. It would “require that companies work with law enforcement to identify, remove, report and preserve evidence related to child exploitation.” While the bill doesn’t specifically mention encryption, it would be hard for Facebook to cooperate if it couldn’t read the underlying messages.

Under the bill, companies that don’t cooperate with law enforcement would no longer receive protection from Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act-the law that shields them from much liability for content their users post. In Facebook’s eyes, this law is the only way to make content moderation tenable. Without it, it could face civil lawsuits for libelous and other problematic content, and will have a much greater incentive to pull down far more content.

But Graham thinks that Section 230 gives companies like Facebook too much freedom in how they run their platforms. He also doesn’t like encryption. So if he doesn’t get his way on encryption, at least he’ll get his way on the content moderation. Like Graham’s idea or not, you have to admit that it’s clever.

The vegan pet food startup won backing from billionaire Mark Cuban on the reality show “Shark Tank” and has raised $16 million in total investments, including from Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel. “You don’t have to be a doctor or plumber,” said Bethencourt. “You can build the next Facebook, Genentech, or Beyond Meat and change the world.”

Bethencourt’s company is one of the 4.4 million Latino-owned businesses that contribute more than $700 billion a year to the American economy. But Bethencourt’s success gaining access to capital is an exception — pointing to a significant opportunity gap for the U.S., according to the Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Latino Entrepreneur Initiative.

In its fifth annual State of Latino Entrepreneurship report released Friday, researchers note the continuing disparities with non-Latino-owned businesses. They project gaps impacting the U.S. economy totaling $410 billion in annual revenues and 1 million jobs.

Since the beginning of the global financial crisis in 2009, growth in the number of Latino business owners has rapidly surpassed the national average, increasing by 34% compared with 1% for all U.S. business owners, the report showed.

Latino-owned businesses are growing in size too. In 2012, approximately 64,000 firms generated revenue of $1 million or more and the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative estimates that the number has since grown to 150,000.

But access to outside funding has not kept pace. Lenders are wary of the risks of lending to smaller companies and many Latinos lack the connections needed to access investors.

That’s the experience of Martha Montoya, the founder of the tech platform AgTools, which provides farmers with real-time distribution and pricing information. She’s had to come up with the money through individual Latina angel investors and winning cash awards in business competitions.

“I have global customers and half a million dollars in gross sales and I couldn’t get financing, even a line of credit on my house,” said Montoya.

Overall, Latino-owned businesses are less likely to secure loans from banks or venture capital. When all else fails, they’re more likely to fund their companies through credit card debt or factoring — the practice of selling at a discount. But these practices carry personal risk that can impede the ability for these burgeoning businesses to thrive or survive.

Bethencourt said investors looking for new places to put their cash should be more conscientious about the economic impact of the nation’s demographic changes. Hispanics are projected to make up 29% of the U.S. population by 2060 from about 17% today.

“The U.S. is missing a huge driver of growth,” he said. “If we want to keep leading economically like we have, we need to activate the raw talent of people, like Latinos.”

The cruise industry’s trade association said late Thursday that its members – which include the world’s largest operators – had suspended crew movements from China and would deny boarding to any crew member or guest who traveled from or through the mainland during the prior two weeks.

The new restrictions came as 6,000 people were prevented from leaving a ship in the waters off Italy for hours Thursday as health authorities awaited test results for two passengers from Hong Kong. They ultimately were shown to have the flu, not coronavirus.

Passengers can be screened a number of ways, including questionnaires and checks of their travel documents to show where they have recently visited. Some cruise lines will also put mandatory health screening measures in place for some or all guests before they board.

The restriction will be in place “pending further guidance from global health authorities regarding the status of the outbreak,” said Bari Golin-Blaugrund, a spokeswoman for the Cruise Lines International Association, in an email.

This isn’t the first time cruise operators have issued temporary rules preventing some passengers from boarding. In 2014, during the Ebola outbreak, member cruise lines did not allow passengers or crew to get on ships if they had visited any of the countries that were given a Level 3 Travel Warning by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That included Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia – not countries that are major markets for cruise travel. China, on the other hand, has been a growing source of passengers for global cruise lines. In 2018, according to CLIA, nearly 2.2 million people from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan took a cruise.

China has that same Level 3 designation from the CDC now, and the U.S. State Department raised its travel advisory for China late Thursday to warn citizens not to travel there. Also on Thursday, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak to be a “public health emergency.” Nearly 10,000 cases of the virus have been confirmed, most of them in China, and more than 200 people have died.

Golin-Blaugrund said that to CLIA’s knowledge, its member cruise lines have suspended sailings to and from mainland China.

Some operators have announced measures that go beyond those that the association laid out.

MSC Cruises, which is based in Geneva but has ships sailing around the world, said Thursday that no one who had traveled from mainland China or visited the country in the past 30 days would be allowed to board a ship and that all guests and crew would have to undergo thermal scans before getting on any ship.

Anyone with signs of illness, including chills, cough, difficulty breathing or a fever of 100.4 degrees or higher, will not be allowed on board. Passengers who come down with fevers during a cruise, as well as close contacts and crew members who served them, will be isolated in their cabins, MSC said.

Royal Caribbean Cruises, whose lines include Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises, Azamara Club Cruises and Silversea Cruises, has canceled all China and Hong Kong voyages through mid-February. The company said Thursday that all ships in its fleet would adopt health screening measures “until further notice.” They include denying boarding to anyone who traveled from or through mainland China or Hong Kong over the past 15 days.

Special health screening will be mandatory for: anyone who has been in contact with people who traveled from or through China or Hong Kong over the previous 15 days; anyone who holds a passport from China or Hong Kong, regardless of when they were last there; or those who say they don’t feel well, or show any flulike symptoms. Anyone with a fever or low blood oxygen will not be allowed on a ship.

“These steps are intentionally conservative, and we apologize that they will inconvenience some of our guests,” the cruise company said in a statement.

Colleen McDaniel, editor in chief of Cruise Critic, said in an email that cruise lines have always had regular policies in place to check for illness as passengers are boarding and prevent those who are sick from getting on a ship with hundreds, or thousands, of other people.

“But that’s on a case-by-case basis,” she said. “This wider-spread policy to deny boarding to those who have been in a particular destination is unusual, but it reflects the concern from passengers and caution from the industry.”

Helmersson was previously head of operations, and Persson moves to the supervisory board after more than a decade, where he succeeds his father, Stefan Persson, as chairman. Stockholm-based H&M announced the changes as it reported quarterly earnings that beat analyst estimates, pushing the shares to their biggest gain in more than seven months.

The stock move is a much-needed boost for investors who have watched H&M shares gain just 10% during Persson’s tenure, while rival Inditex, the owner of Zara, has surged almost fourfold in the period. Long the go-to place for Scandi-inspired, well-designed staples like blouses and jeans, H&M has ceded its pacemaker role to the likes of Primark that undercut it in price, or Internet specialists like Asos Plc and Zalando SE that promised shoppers more instant gratification.

Inditex also pioneered the concept of branching out into sub-brands for different tastes and budgets. H&M has emulated the idea with units including COS or Arket, which aim at a wide-ranging shopping experience, selling everything from clothing to make-up to home-decoration trinkets like candles and flower pots.

When Persson, 44, took over in 2009, he was in his early 30s and had spent a few years on the company board, overseeing expansion, business development as well as brands and new business. At the time, H&M enjoyed major successes recruiting seasonal guest designers ranging from Karl Lagerfeld to Roberto Cavalli, collaborations that were huge hits because they offered luxury-fashion names at ultra-competitive prices.

But the going got tougher over the years. Physical shops began looking outdated, the guest-designer concept was running out of force and acquisitions like Cheap Monday, the company’s first-ever, flopped. Moving into home decoration, a lucrative niche where Zara and more upmarket brands like Armani had long established themselves, proved hard, as was the shift to online. As a result, inventory built up, forcing the company into a series of missed targets and profit warnings in recent years.

The Persson family retains outsize control over the company. Founded by Erling Persson in 1947, the family is by far the biggest shareholder and has steadily lifted its stake over the years, particularly after operational troubles depressed the stock. Stefan Persson, who took over from Erling, ran the business for more than a decade. He’s the richest Swede, and ranks 15th in Europe, with a net worth of about $19.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Helmersson is herself a long-standing H&M employee. She started in 1997 as an economist in the company’s purchasing department, and did a five-year stint as sustainability manager. She’s been COO for just over a year.

“I feel confident in handing over the CEO role to Helena, who is an experienced and great leader who embodies our values,” Persson said. “Helena will continue to work on the plan that we have adopted for 2020 and onwards.”

The timing of the handover suggests H&M may be through the worst. The retailer said fewer markdowns contributed to an improvement in profit for the full year and in the fourth quarter, leading to a pretax profit of to 5.4 billion kronor ($561 million) in the three months through November, more than the 4.8 billion kronor that analysts had expected.

Over the past year, shares in H&M have gained more than 35%, beating the OMX Stockholm index, which is up 19%. Of the 33 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg, seven recommend buying H&M stock, while the rest are advising clients to either hold on to the shares they have or sell.

The Anglo-Dutch giant initiated a review of its global tea business, which includes the more than century-old label and generates sales of almost 3 billion euros ($3.3 billion). The move comes after the company’s slowest quarterly growth in a decade.

Unilever is following a consumer shift to coffee as a primary source of caffeine, with takeaway cafes proliferating from London to Beijing and capsule-spewing espresso machines supplanting kettles on kitchen counters around the world.

In the U.K., almost 900 million fewer cups of tea were drunk over the 12 months through May 2018, according to trade publication The Grocer. Even those who eschew coffee are giving a pass to the traditional cup of English Breakfast or Earl Grey, opting for herbal alternatives.

Demand for black tea has been “slowing in developed markets for several years due to changing consumer preferences,” Chief Financial Officer Graeme Pitkethly said on a call. The strategic review “could include a whole range of options — no ownership, partial ownership.”

The review accelerates Chief Executive Officer Alan Jope’s restructuring of the owner of Dove soap and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, which has been hurt by sluggish demand for big brands. Under predecessor Paul Polman, Unilever sold its margarine and spreads business to KKR & Co. for about $8 billion. The company tried to profit from growth in herbal tea by acquiring the Pukka brand in 2017.

The shares rose as much as 1.6% early Thursday in Amsterdam. The tea review is expected to conclude by midyear.

The company posted 1.5% growth in underlying sales in the fourth quarter, just above a consensus analyst estimate but still the slowest in a decade. For the full year, sales declined 0.5% in the developed world as shoppers switched to supermarkets’ own-label products and higher-priced niche products.

Rival Nestle, which has a portfolio of coffee brands including Nescafe and Nespresso, has also launched a sweeping overhaul of its overall lineup, including recent deals to divest portions of its luncheon-meat and ice cream businesses. In 2017, Starbucks Corp. announced that it would close all of its 379 mall-based Teavana stores due to persistent underperformance.

Unilever’s strategic review of tea suggests there might be “wider action on the portfolio,” Jefferies analyst Martin Deboo said in a note.

Jope has been quicker than his predecessor to rethink Unilever’s business. In 2014, Polman separated the spreads business into a standalone unit, but it wasn’t sold until three years later, after Unilever rejected an unsolicited takeover approach for the whole company from Kraft Heinz Co.

Unilever’s personal-care business, the company’s largest, is struggling too. In the latest period it was hurt by weak pricing of shampoo and other hair products in the U.S.

The souring performance comes a month after Jope warned investors that sales gains would be below earlier guidance in 2019 and in the lower half of its expected range this year.

The results cap a tough first year at the helm for Jope. The company will act faster on backing new products when they’re successful or divesting them when they’re not, he said on a conference call with analysts. Managers can tell after about 100 days whether a new product is worth more investment or should be discontinued.

Tea has been around much longer, but now looks like it could be one of the first targets for Jope’s cull.

“It has been significantly dilutive to growth for the past ten years,” the CEO said on a call.