Morning Agenda: How the S.E.C. Threw in the Towel on Lehman

THE END OF THE BID TO PUNISH LEHMAN EXECUTIVES  |  At a closed-door meeting in early 2011, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s eight-member Lehman Brothers team concluded that suing the bank’s executives would be legally unjustified, Ben Protess and Susanne Craig report in DealBook. “The group, noting that prosecutors and F.B.I. agents had already walked away from a parallel criminal case, reached unanimous agreement to close its most prominent investigation stemming from the financial crisis, according to officials who attended the meeting, which has not been reported previously.”

But Mary L. Schapiro, the S.E.C. chairwoman, disagreed, pushing George S. Canellos, who supervised the Lehman investigation as head of the S.E.C.’s New York office, to explain how Lehman executives could escape without a single civil charge. “I don’t get it,” she said during a tense exchange with Mr. Canellos. “Why is there no case?” she continued, staring at Mr. Canellos, instructing him to continue investigating whether Lehman misled investors. “The world won’t understand.”

“She was right,” DealBook writes. “Five years after Lehman’s collapse hastened a worldwide economic panic, the government faces lingering questions about the decision to spare executives like Richard S. Fuld Jr., who ran Lehman for 14 years until its demise. Not a single senior executive from any Wall Street bank faced criminal charges from the crisis, either. And the government’s deadline for filing most charges will expire this month, the anniversary of Lehman’s collapse.”

NEIMAN MARCUS NEAR DEAL TO BE SOLD FOR $6 BILLION  |  The owners of the Neiman Marcus chain are near a deal to sell the luxury retailer to a group led by Ares Management and the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board for about $6 billion, DealBook’s Michael J. de la Merced reports. A deal could be announced as soon as this week, a person briefed on the matter said on Sunday, cautioning that the talks could still fall apart.

A deal would end nearly eight years of control by Warburg Pincus and TPG Capital, which have been looking to exit their investment for several months. The two investment firms filed this spring to take Neiman public but also began pursuing an outright sale that would help them end their ties to the company more quickly, Mr. de la Merced reports.

IN VODAFONE DEAL, PAYING THE PRICE FOR WAITING  |  Verizon’s agreement to acquire Vodafone’s stake in Verizon Wireless for $130 billion seems overpriced, James B. Stewart, a columnist for The New York Times, writes. The staggering price tag raises questions: “Why did Verizon wait so long to buy the rest of the wireless company? Why now? And why did it ever put its crown jewel, wireless assets, into a joint venture to begin with?”

“I was advocating that we buy out Vodafone from Day 1,” Dennis Strigl, the former chief executive of Verizon Wireless, told Mr. Stewart. “The whole issue for us was there was never a better time to buy than the year before. We just kept building more value and, therefore, a higher price. I wish we’d bought it in 2001.”

ON THE AGENDA  |  Neal Wolin, deputy secretary of the Treasury Department, is on CNBC starting at 7 a.m. Palo Alto Networks reports earnings after the market closes. Data on consumer credit in July is out at 3 p.m.

HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL’S EXPERIMENT IN GENDER EQUITY  |  The members of the Harvard Business School class of 2013 were “unwitting guinea pigs in what would have once sounded like a far-fetched feminist fantasy,” Jodi Kantor reports in The New York Times. “What if Harvard Business School gave itself a gender makeover, changing its curriculum, rules and social rituals to foster female success?”

“The country’s premier business training ground was trying to solve a seemingly intractable problem. Year after year, women who had arrived with the same test scores and grades as men fell behind,” Ms. Kantor reports. “Many Wall Street-hardened women confided that Harvard was worse than any trading floor, with first-year students divided into sections that took all their classes together and often developed the overheated dynamics of reality shows.”

Mergers & Acquisitions »

Glaxo to Sell Drink Brands for $2.1 Billion  |  The British pharmaceutical giant has agreed to sell two soft drink brands, Lucozade and Ribena, to Suntory Beverage and Food of Japan for £1.35 billion, or $2.1 billion.
DealBook »

Swedish Tissue Maker Bids $1.1 Billion for Chinese Peer  |  Sweden’s SCA Group offered on Monday to pay $1.1 billion for all of the shares in the Chinese paper hygiene products company Vinda International that it did not already own.
DealBook »

Concern That Microsoft Is Growing Too Complex to Manage  |  “A list of missed opportunities and disappointing investments at the company in the past decade in areas like smartphones, tablets and Internet search have led to the belief that a more focused, nimble collection of mini-Microsofts could respond more effectively to the never-ending flow of disruptive technologies nibbling at its foundations,” Nick Wingfield writes in The New York Times.
NEW YORK TIMES

Owner of Politico Buys New York News Site  |  Robert Allbritton, the publisher of Politico, has purchased Capital New York, an online news publication in New York, with plans to expand the organization, according to an announcement on Monday.
NEWS RELEASE

U.S. Security Panel Clears a Chinese Takeover of Smithfield Foods  |  The approval came despite deep-seated skepticism by a group of lawmakers, who professed concern about a Chinese company owning the country’s biggest pork producer.
DealBook »

Kering Takes Minority Stake in Altuzarra Fashion Label  |  Kering, the conglomerate that is home to brands including Alexander McQueen and Balenciaga, announced on Friday that it had taken a minority stake in the label started by the French-American designer Joseph Altuzarra.
DealBook »

American Tower Adds Wireless Infrastructure in $3.3 Billion Deal  |  By expanding its holdings, American Tower is hoping to take advantage of the plans by the big wireless carriers to upgrade their networks to feed the consumer demand for cellphones and broadband services.
DealBook »

INVESTMENT BANKING »

Bank of America to Pay $39 Million in Sex Bias Case  |  The settlement comes on the heels of a big payout for a racial discrimination lawsuit.
DealBook »

A Mortgage Market Out of Balance  |  The vast system that provides home loans to millions of Americans has long been a strange place. A surprising development has made it even stranger.
DealBook »

A Mayor Seen as Close to Wall Street Explains Himself  |  In an interview with New York magazine, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York responded to the assertion that he is “in the tank for Wall Street.”

“The mortgage crisis was not the exclusive creation of the banks,” he told the magazine. “I’m not taking the banks off the hook. But I don’t think that just because you’re a banker you should be vilified.”
NEW YORK

The Power of Stepping Back  |  In the Life@Work column, Tony Schwartz makes a case for giving your brain a break from the phone calls, e-mail, texts, meetings and all the other distractions of a workday.
DealBook »

A Magazine Turns to Film to Recount the Financial Crisis  |  Bloomberg Businessweek is behind a new documentary, “Hank: Five Years From the Brink,” about the former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. and his role in fighting the financial meltdown, David Carr, a columnist for The New York Times, writes.
NEW YORK TIMES

PRIVATE EQUITY »

For Dell, the Moment of Truth  |  Shareholders of Dell are set to vote on Thursday on a buyout proposal by the company’s founder, Michael S. Dell. “A change in Dell’s voting rules looks certain to hand control to Mr. Dell and Silver Lake Partners, the private equity firm backing his offer,” The Financial Times writes.
FINANCIAL TIMES

HEDGE FUNDS »

Hedge Fund Partner Helps His Fellow Gamers  |  Jon Finkel, a partner in the hedge fund Landscape Capital, is a founder of Gamers Helping Gamers, a nonprofit organization that offers scholarships to students who play the fantasy trading card game Magic: The Gathering.
NEW YORK TIMES

Perella Weinberg Said to Shut Down Health Care Funds  | 
CNBC

I.P.O./OFFERINGS »

Chinese Dairy Firm Plans $1.3 Billion I.P.O.  |  China Huishan Dairy will test investors’ appetite with its plans for a new share sale in Hong Kong, where the market for I.P.O.s has been weak since June, when several deals were shelved or sharply reduced in size.
DealBook »

Without a Concession in Hong Kong, Alibaba May List in New York  |  Alibaba is prepared to abandon plans for an initial public offering in Hong Kong “if the senior management cannot nominate a majority of board directors, said people close to the company,” The Financial Times reports.
FINANCIAL TIMES

Instagram’s Challenge: Make Money  |  The director of business operations at Instagram, Emily White, who joined the company from Facebook, is “charged with turning a billion-dollar acquisition that has never made a cent into a real business,” The Wall Street Journal writes.
WALL STREET JOURNAL

British Real Estate Web Site Said to Consider I.P.O.  |  Zoopla, a British site that provides real estate information, has hired Credit Suisse to consider opportunities that could include an initial public offering in London, Reuters reports.
REUTERS

VENTURE CAPITAL »

NYSE Euronext to Invest in Start-Up for Private Stock Placements  |  NYSE Euronext is expected to announce on Monday that it has made a minority investment in ACE, a three-year-old start-up that offers companies a centralized platform to privately sell stocks, bonds and other securities.
DealBook »

From the Ashes of Myspace, Start-Ups Rise  |  “Almost every member of Myspace’s founding team has begun a new venture, and several are among the leaders of Los Angeles’s blossoming start-up industry, now known as Silicon Beach,” The New York Times writes.
NEW YORK TIMES

Sequoia Capital Pulls Back From South America  |  The move by the Silicon Valley venture capital firm shows the difficulty it has faced in finding attractive investments in the region, even as start-ups have proliferated in recent years.
DealBook »

Spotify Said to Seek to Raise Money at $5.27 Billion Valuation  |  According to a report in a Swedish newspaper, the streaming music service Spotify is looking to raise money at a valuation that would be significantly higher than its previously estimated valuation of $3 billion, VentureBeat writes.
VENTUREBEAT

LEGAL/REGULATORY »

Barofsky, Bailout Watchdog, Joins Law Firm  |  The New York Times reports: “Neil Barofsky, the former prosecutor who brought transparency and accountability to the federal government’s 2008 bank bailout program as its first special inspector general, has joined Jenner & Block, a law firm based in Chicago, as a partner.”
NEW YORK TIMES

A Call for Higher Capital From a Former British Official  |  John Vickers, the former chairman of the Independent Commission on Banking in Britain, “believes banks’ capital levels should be at least twice as high as the level recommended two years ago by the government-appointed commission he led,” The Financial Times reports.
FINANCIAL TIMES

Soft Jobs Data Not Expected to Affect Fed’s Plans  |  “Despite a disappointing jobs report on Friday that raised fresh questions about the nation’s economic strength, analysts say they still believe the Federal Reserve will start pulling back on its stimulus program in a few weeks,” The New York Times writes.
NEW YORK TIMES

The Loan Behind the Loans  |  “Online lenders who charge borrowers stratospheric interest rates are coming under pressure from state regulators â€" and it’s about time,” Gretchen Morgenson, a columnist for The New York Times writes. “But to get at the root of the problem, the regulators may need to dig much deeper.”
NEW YORK TIMES

New Rules Will Tighten the Spigot on Reverse Mortgages  |  Under new rules, “some people with heavy debt who were hoping a reverse mortgage would solve their financial problems may find that it is no longer a viable option,” Tara Siegel Bernard, a columnist for The New York Times, writes.
NEW YORK TIMES

Fresh Restrictions for Apple on E-Books  |  The New York Times reports: “As punishment for engaging in an e-book price-fixing conspiracy, Apple will be forced to abide by new restrictions on its agreements with publishers and be evaluated by an external ‘compliance officer’ for two years, a federal judge has ruled.”
NEW YORK TIMES