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.”