GoDaddy Is Said to Be Exploring I.P.O.

GoDaddy, the online domain registrar known for its racy television commercials, is preparing to file for an initial public offering, a person briefed on the matter said on Friday.

Preparations for an I.P.O. are just getting started, with the company expected to begin interviewing banks in the coming weeks. But the process could pave the way for an eventual exit by GoDaddy’s owners, the private equity firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Silver Lake, and a smaller firm, Technology Crossover Ventures.

That group acquired GoDaddy for $2.25 billion in 2011. Since then, GoDaddy has worked to expand its offerings for small- and medium-size businesses, and increase its revenues from web hosting. It is the largest domain name registrar in the world.

At the same time, it has recently begun to reform its public image. One of its most recent Super Bowl commercials did not feature scantily clad women, but a plug for a new small-business tool.

Bob Parsons, the founder of GoDaddy, who gained notoriety for shooting an elephant in Zimbabwe, remains chairman of the company. The new owners installed a new chief executive, Blake Irving, in 2012.

A person briefed on the matter said that no banks were yet in the lead for the mandate, and that no target had been set for the company’s public valuation. The company also has not decided on the amount of money it will try to raise.

Should it go public, GoDaddy will join a wave of high-profile companies going public in the healthiest I.P.O. market since the financial crisis. Technology companies such as GoPro, Box and King are all working on offerings, as is investment bank Moelis, and the large Asia-based web firm Alibaba.

All of the companies involved in GoDaddy declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal online first reported on the company’s preparations.

Start-Up Seeks to Capitalize on Security Concerns for Bitcoins

After living with hyperinflation, currency fluctuations and minimal access to credit in his country, Wences Casares, an Argentine raised on a sheep farm, says he has the vision and team to make Bitcoin more widespread and accepted worldwide.

Mr. Casares, a veteran tech entrepreneur who hails from the tiny Patagonian town of Esquel, is setting his sights on an equally volatile space: virtual currencies.

Xapo, his new start-up that opened to the public this week, provides a Bitcoin wallet combined with a cold storage vault, allowing for transfers. The vault is a series of physical servers all over the world that has biometric access, security and is filmed around the clock, Mr. Casares said. The vault also comes with insurance, provided by the Meridian Insurance Group.

As security concerns abound for Bitcoin believers, especially after the recent collapse of the Mt. Gox exchange, Mr. Casares may have struck at the right time. An estimated 750,000 customers lost more than $450 million worth of Bitcoins when the site went dark and filed for bankruptcy last month.

The idea for the company germinated in early 2011 when Mr. Casares bought his first Bitcoins, three for approximately $3 a piece, he recalled.

He kept buying more. He then looked for a way to store them and so built a so-called vault for his personal collection. Soon after, friends began asking if they could also store their supply there and he obliged. Financial institutions made similar requests, and over the last year, Xapo stored Bitcoins for family offices, sovereign wealth funds, and hedge funds. The Argentine would not name them, citing confidentiality, but said about half were based in the United States and the rest spread over the globe.

On Thursday, Mr. Casares announced that Xapo, based in Palo Alto, Calif., received $20 million in funding in a round led by Benchmark Capital. Ribbit Capital and Fortress Investment Group also joined. Mr. Casares also has the tech credentials to win that kind of backing from Silicon Valley after having run Lemon, a digital wallet that was acquired last year by LifeLock for about $43 million.

Matt Cohler, a partner at Benchmark Capital and a former Facebook and LinkedIn executive, said he backed the company in part because he believed it was making an important contribution to building trust in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

He also noted that Mr. Casares’s experiences in Argentina and Brazil, where credit access remains scarce, have immense value.

“His personal passion for Bitcoin and his depth and breadth of expertise in global fintech are unparalleled,” Mr. Cohler said.

Wedbush Securities in a February research note estimated that nearly $86 million of venture capital has been invested in Bitcoin-related companies, mostly in the last 12 months.

Xapo’s team includes Federico Murrone, co-founder and chief operating officer, and a longtime associate, and Carlos Rienzi, its senior vice president of security, who was formerly a systems engineer at Cisco Systems.

Cindy McAdam is co-founder and president, and Mary Chan is controller. Ted Rogers joined Xapo this year as senior vice president of business development. He previously lived in Brazil and was a general partner at Arpex Capital, a venture capital firm. He is currently a limited partner at that firm.

Most of these people worked with Mr. Casares at his previous company, Lemon.

Berkshire Hathaway Board Recommends Shareholders Vote Against Dividend

Warren E. Buffett prefers to use Berkshire Hathaway’s huge cash pile to buy up companies, rather than return it to shareholders.

It is a strategy that has worked well for years, with Berkshire shares up 125 percent in the five years since the financial crisis, and the company still acquiring huge companies like Heinz.

But with Berkshire sitting on more than $40 billion in cash, some shareholders would like to see a change in the company’s policy.

On Friday, Berkshire disclosed in a proxy filing that at its upcoming annual meeting, shareholders will have a chance to vote on a proposal that would encourage the company to pay an annual dividend.

“Whereas the corporation has more money than it needs and since the owners unlike Warren are not multi-billionaires, the board shall consider paying a meaningful annual dividend on the shares,” the proposal reads. It was introduced by David Witt, an individual investor who owns just 70 shares of Berkshire stock, worth about $8,588.

Shareholders shouldn’t hold their breath, and not just because the proposal is coming from one small shareholder.

The Berkshire board, the company said, regularly considers return of capital programs, and regularly decides against them.

“The board of directors does not believe this proposal is necessary in light of the fact that on an annual basis the Board of Directors does in fact consider whether or not the Corporation should continue to retain all of its earnings,” the company said in its proxy.

Unsurprisingly, Berkshire’s board is recommending shareholders vote against Mr. Witt’s proposal.

The Berkshire board is also recommending that shareholders vote against a shareholder proposal that calls for the company to “establish reasonable, quantitative goals for reduction of greenhouse gas and other air emissions at its energy-generating holdings,” and publish a report outlining its strategy to meet the goals.

In this case, as well, the Berkshire board believes it knows better than shareholders.

“We recognize the importance of reducing greenhouse gas and other emissions to our shareholders and the future of Berkshire and its subsidiary companies,” the company said in its proxy.

But, noting similar proposals have not passed in recent year,s the board “does not believe that establishing quantitative goals for the reduction of greenhouse gas and other air emissions at its energy-generating holdings and that publishing a report that includes plans to retrofit or retire existing coal-burning plants is a prudent exercise to undertake.”

ISS Debut Gives Less-Than-Stellar Return for Goldman and EQT

Lego has trumped Goldman Sachs in the $1.5 billion flotation of ISS, a cleaning and catering group based in Denmark.

Lego, owned by the Kirk Kristiansen family of Denmark, made a minority investment in ISS in 2012 to help cut its debt. ISS’s successful stock market debut has brought a huge return for the Lego latecomers. That left ISS’s other owners, the private equity firm EQT and Goldman, in the dust.

The March 13 initial public offering of ISS went well. Its stock priced at 160 Danish crowns and closed up 14 percent at 182.7 crowns. EQT, backed by Sweden’s powerful Wallenberg family, and Goldman’s private equity gurus, sold one million shares at the float price, and may offload 7.7 million in the coming weeks. They retain 89.5 million additional shares. So their holdings, plus the 160 million crowns already raised, are now worth 17.9 billion crowns, or $3.3 billion United States dollars.

That gives a 2.3 times gross return on the 7.7 billion crowns of equity that EQT and Goldman invested in ISS’s leveraged buyout in 2005. Neither firm made any further investments into the business, nor did they take dividends out. That means the investment to date has delivered a less-than-stellar 10 percent gross annual rate of return.

For the investment clients of EQT and Goldman, the return will be even lower because of fees. In typical private equity funds, these can run to 1.75 percent in annual management charges and 20 percent of investment gains. The shares of ISS’s listed rivals would have been a simpler and more lucrative bet. Investors who bought Sodexo or Compass stock in May 2005 and reinvested dividends have roughly quadrupled or quintupled their money, respectively, Thomson Reuters’s Datastream showed.

For EQT and Goldman, this deal was marred by high debts, and numerous failed attempts at sales or flotations. Contrast that with the rapid profit for the Lego billionaires’ investment vehicle, and their partners in the 2012 equity injection, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. The duo’s investment of 3.7 billion crowns has turned into stakes worth 6.4 billion crowns, for a 41 percent internal rate of return.

Investing in private companies not long before they go public can backfire. Ask Norway’s oil fund, which is regretting a move into Formula One. But here it allowed the Ontario pension plan and the Lego family to profit handsomely.

Alibaba Aims for an I.P.O. in New York

Alibaba, the Chinese Internet giant, is planning to file for an initial public offering in New York as soon as next month, a person briefed on the matter said on Friday.

The potential stock sale would be one of the biggest in history, almost certain to at least rival Facebook’s $16 billion offering in 2012.

No underwriters have been formally selected. Two banks that have long advised Alibaba, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley, are expected to play major roles. Other banks are expected to be added over time.

The selection of New York would come as a snub to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, which has resisted overtures to bless Alibaba’s partnership structure, in which a group of insiders would maintain some control over the company’s board.  The rules of the Hong Kong exchange prohibit corporate structures that let minority shareholders preserve control of companies.

A spokeswoman for Alibaba said: “We have no timetable, no venue and no underwriters hired for an I.P.O. event.”

Representatives for Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley declined to comment.

USEC Bankruptcy Shakes Up Creditor Line

There is theory and then there is actual practice. The Chapter 11 bankruptcy case of USEC, which processes uranium for power plants, provides a nice reminder.

Academics, in both the business and legal worlds, spend a lot of timing worrying about the “absolute priority rule.” This is the idea that secured creditors are paid in full before unsecured ones, and the unsecured creditors are paid in full before shareholders receive anything.

Academics have long argued that failure to heed the absolute priority rule with great rigor results in higher debt costs for all borrowers in the economy. It’s the basis for many academic criticisms of Chapter 11.

But now we have the USEC reorganization plan, which creditors and preferred shareholders have agreed to support. It would give the holders of existing convertible notes cash for their accrued but unpaid interest, as well as new notes and just more than 79 percent of the stock of the reorganized company.

The preferred shareholders â€" Toshiba and Babcock & Wilcox â€" would receive just more than $40 million in notes and not quite 16 percent of the new equity. The old shareholders would retain a 5 percent interest in the company.

All other claims would ride through the bankruptcy unaffected.

Of real interest is what’s happening to the preferred shares â€" especially relative to the convertible debt. The preferred shareholders are upgrading their place in the capital structure â€" becoming creditors instead of mere shareholders â€" while also retaining a nice piece of the potential upside.

But the holders of convertible debt are not being paid in full. USEC, which is based in Bethesda, Md., estimates they are recovering a bit less than 70 percent, but Bloomberg News reports that the bonds are trading at about 40 percent to face value. Even allowing for some discount for the possibility the plan will fall through, this suggests USEC’s estimate is a bit on the optimistic side.

In short, the plan contains a rather obvious violation of the absolute priority rule.

Nonetheless, USEC reports that about 65 percent of its bondholders support the deal. Based on a quick look at the known holders â€" again via Bloomberg â€" this does not look like an unsophisticated bunch. It includes Highbridge Capital, J. Goldman & Company, GLG Partners and the like.

So they have agreed to a deal that gives the preferred shareholders money that the bondholders would normally be entitled to demand.

Maybe, just maybe, this suggests that the academics need to think a bit more about the subtleties of the absolute priority rule.

Sometimes continuing the business as a going concern means realizing the soft power of those that would normally have lower-ranked claims. In this case, it’s probably not a coincidence that the two preferred shareholders are big players in the power industry.

Stephen J. Lubben is the Harvey Washington Wiley Chair in corporate governance and business ethics at Seton Hall Law School and an expert on bankruptcy.

Castlight Health Soars in Stock Market Debut

Stock market investors are lining up for a piece of Castlight Health, a young company that provides software to track health care costs.

Shares of the company more than doubled in their trading debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday morning. The stock opened at $37.50 a share, after the initial public offering was priced at $16 a share on Thursday evening.

At the I.P.O. price, the company raised $177.6 million, not including additional shares that the underwriters have the option to buy. That valued the company’s equity at $1.39 billion.

Founded in 2008 and based in San Francisco, Castlight caters to businesses that want to track and analyze the cost of providing health care coverage to their employees. The company makes most of its money by selling subscriptions to its software suite. Its customers include CVS Caremark, T. Rowe Price and Tesla, according to its website.

The company has been a venture capital favorite, raising $100 million in a financing round in 2012. And it has the support of prominent figures in health care and government.

One of the Castlight’s three founders is Todd Park, who currently works as President Obama’s chief technology officer. Dr. Robert Kocher, a former special assistant to the president who helped shape the Affordable Care Act, sits on the company’s board. Another director is David Ebersman, the chief financial officer of Facebook.

The company’s revenue more than tripled last year to $13 million, according to its I.P.O. prospectus. But it is not yet profitable, reporting a $62 million loss for 2013.

The stock offering consisted of 11.1 million Class B shares, which, in certain situations, have 10 times fewer votes than Class A shares, which the insiders hold. Those situations include when an investor seeks to own 30 percent or more of the total shares.

The stock trades under the ticker symbol CSLT. The joint book-runners of the offering are Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Citigroup’s Proxy Details Link of Pay to Performance

The public is at something of a loss when it comes to judging whether big banks are following new rules that are meant to make them less risky.

But tracking banker compensation is not a bad way to start. Indeed, Citigroup’s 2014 proxy report, which was released on Wednesday, has some intriguing disclosures on pay that allow outsiders to partially weigh the degree to which a large institution is using compensation to hold its senior executives accountable.

The authorities used to take a hands-off stance toward Wall Street compensation. But after the financial crisis of 2008, regulators around the world decided that the banks they oversaw needed to remove incentives that fueled dangerous levels of short-term risk-taking. That meant doing away with big cash bonuses that rewarded bankers upfront, even though their businesses might blow up later. Instead, the regulators pressed banks to stagger the payment of bonuses over several years. The idea is that if a trade or deal goes bad in the future, the bank can “claw back” the deferred pay before employees who committed the missteps actually receive it.

In its proxy, Citigroup described a new set of conditions called the general clawback.

Under this, pay can be taken back if the company’s compensation committee determines that an employee “exercised materially imprudent judgment that caused harm to any of Citi’s business operations.”

Citigroup’s clawback rules also say the bank will move to recoup pay if an employee “materially violated any risk limits established or revised by senior management and/or risk management.” In other words, a trader can make a profit but will still be penalized if it was achieved in a way that merely risked outsize losses.

Citigroup’s proxy contains detailed scorecards for a handful of its most senior executives, laying out the metrics used to assess their compensation. Some of them are financial, which drove 70 percent of the assessment of Michael L. Corbat, the bank’s chief executive.

The other 30 percent are driven by nonfinancial metrics. One of them has to do with maintaining good relations with external stakeholders, which include regulators. In theory, then, Mr. Corbat could have some pay docked if relations with regulators deteriorated. The report card suggests that Mr. Corbat performed well on the nonfinancial goals.

The proxy also gives some specific details about the bank’s attempts to tweak pay to penalize poor performance.

Regulators rebuked a Citigroup affiliate called Banamex USA in 2012 and 2013 for lacking effective oversight of anti-money laundering compliance. That failing was noted in the scorecard of Manuel Medina-Mora, the chief executive of Citigroup’s consumer bank. His overall pay for 2013 was $14 million, down from $15.1 million a year earlier.

The decline for Mr. Medina-Mora was not large. But the scrutiny of Mr. Medina-Mora’s pay may only intensify now that other problems have surfaced at Banamex.

Citigroup said late last month that the unit was a victim of a $400 million fraud committed by a Mexican oil-services company. The proxy, however, sends mixed messages on how the fraud affected compensation.

It says the fraud led to a $40 million reduction in variable pay at Banamex without saying whose pay was cut. But the proxy also says that the fraud has not yet prompted the compensation committee to reduce performance pay for 2013, including the compensation for senior executives like Mr. Medina-Mora. The proxy said the committee refrained in part because a review of the fraud had not been completed. It also said that the financial effect of the fraud on executive performance metrics was “minimal.”

Though the proxy did hold out the possibility of cutting that pay when the review was complete, something of a mystery remains. Citi decided to immediately cut Banamex pay by $40 million, but it held back from cutting performance pay until the review is over. Why the different treatment?

UBS Discloses It Is Reviewing Its Precious Metals Business

LONDON â€" The Swiss bank UBS said on Friday that it was conducting an internal review of its precious metals business amid expanding regulatory investigations into potential manipulation of interest rates and the price of commodities and currencies.

In its annual report released on Friday, UBS said that it had been conducting a review of its foreign exchange operations, including its precious metals business. The bank said it was cooperating with regulators, noting in its review that “a number of authorities also are reportedly investigating potential manipulation of precious metal prices.”

On Friday as well, Hong Kong’s banking regulator found that traders at UBS tried to rig the Hong Kong Interbank Offered Rate over a four-year period, but ultimately had no impact on how the local benchmark interest rate was set. As a result, the regulator did not fine the bank.

Regulators in Britain and Germany are all looking at the whether benchmark rates for gold and silver prices may have been manipulated. As the scrutiny has mounted, banks have been scaling back or leaving parts of their commodities businesses.

The Financial Conduct Authority of Britain began looking at other benchmark rates, including for gold and silver, as part of an outgrowth of its investigation of rigging of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, and other global interest rate benchmarks, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The Federal Financial Supervisory Authority of Germany, or BaFin, has acknowledged that it is looking at the trading of precious metals as part of its inquiry into potential manipulation of the currency markets.

More than 20 traders have been suspended or fired as part of internal investigations at some of the world’s largest banks into potential manipulation of currency markets. But no suspensions have been emerged regarding precious metals trading.

The process of setting the benchmark price for gold in London dates to 1919. It is set twice a day by five firms that serve as market makers, according to the London Bullion Market Association.

Barclays, Société Générale, Deutsche Bank, Scotiabank and HSBC are the member firms that help set the daily benchmark prices for gold in London.

In January, Deutsche Bank said that it planned to stop participating in the setting of gold and silver benchmarks as it scaled back its commodities business.

Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch have all sold or closed parts of their commodities operations in recent months.

JPMorgan Chase announced plans in July to possibly sell or spin off its physical commodities business. The Mercuria Energy Group, a fast-growing energy and commodities trading company, entered into exclusive talks to acquire the business last month, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

The manipulation of Libor and other benchmark interest rates continues to cast a black mark on the industry.

On Friday, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority said that after an investigation of nine banks that were part of the local consortium making daily submissions to determine the Hong Kong Interbank Offered Rate â€" which is used as a benchmark to price corporate loans, household mortgages and other types of debt â€" only UBS was found to have tried to manipulate the rate.

The authority said it discovered about 100 internal chat messages from September 2006 to June 2009 sent by UBS traders that tried to rig the interest rate. The messages were sent to the employee who was responsible for making submissions on the bank’s behalf.

But only about a third of these rate-rigging requests affected the submissions that UBS actually made, the regulator found. Moreover, because UBS acted alone and was not conspiring with other banks to rig rates â€" a situation that proved to be the case in other financial markets, like London â€" the monetary authority found that UBS’s actions ultimately had no impact on how the Hong Kong rate was set each day.

“The bank has cooperated with the H.K.M.A.’s investigation and agreed to comply with the requirements by taking appropriate follow-up actions promptly,” the regulator said Friday in a statement. “The case is a clear reminder to all banks of their duty to uphold robust internal controls and governance and to take adequate measures to prevent and detect internal improprieties.”

In 2012, UBS was fined $1.5 billion by American and British regulators over rate-rigging. In addition, the Swiss bank pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the United States over rate-rigging carried out by its Japanese unit.

Former G.M. Chief Returns to Carlyle

Daniel F. Akerson, the former chief executive of General Motors, has returned to the Carlyle Group, the private equity giant where he worked before running the automaker.

Mr. Akerson, 65, is now the vice chairman of Carlyle and a special adviser to its board, the firm said on Friday. He joined Carlyle on March 1 and is based in Washington, where the firm has its headquarters.

The new roles represent a homecoming for Mr. Akerson, who ran Carlyle’s global buyout group from 2009 to 2010, and was co-head of the firm’s United States buyout group for six years before that. Before joining Carlyle, he was a senior executive at companies like MCI, General Instruments and Nextel.

“Carlyle is a natural fit as I embark on this next chapter of my professional life and I’m excited to return to familiar faces and new challenges,” Mr. Akerson said in a statement. His new responsibilities include providing guidance to Carlyle’s investment teams, management and board.

Mr. Akerson, who was succeeded at G.M. by Mary T. Barra, was seen as something of an accidental chief executive.

He joined the automaker’s board in 2009 as a representative of the government after the company left Chapter 11. Months later, the board forced out the holdover chief executive and replaced him with the chairman. But that chief soon left, opening the door for Mr. Akerson.

G.M. is now under scrutiny for its decade-long failure to disclose deadly safety problems before announcing a big vehicle recall. The Justice Department has begun a criminal investigation into whether the automaker failed to comply with laws requiring timely disclosure of vehicle defects, The New York Times reported this week.

“It is a delight to welcome Dan back to Carlyle,” Daniel A. D’Aniello, the chairman and co-founder of Carlyle, said in a statement. “His remarkable depth of leadership experience will be a great asset to the board and our investment teams.”

Former G.M. Chief Returns to Carlyle

Daniel F. Akerson, the former chief executive of General Motors, has returned to the Carlyle Group, the private equity giant where he worked before running the automaker.

Mr. Akerson, 65, is now the vice chairman of Carlyle and a special adviser to its board, the firm said on Friday. He joined Carlyle on March 1 and is based in Washington, where the firm has its headquarters.

The new roles represent a homecoming for Mr. Akerson, who ran Carlyle’s global buyout group from 2009 to 2010, and was co-head of the firm’s United States buyout group for six years before that. Before joining Carlyle, he was a senior executive at companies like MCI, General Instruments and Nextel.

“Carlyle is a natural fit as I embark on this next chapter of my professional life and I’m excited to return to familiar faces and new challenges,” Mr. Akerson said in a statement. His new responsibilities include providing guidance to Carlyle’s investment teams, management and board.

Mr. Akerson, who was succeeded at G.M. by Mary T. Barra, was seen as something of an accidental chief executive.

He joined the automaker’s board in 2009 as a representative of the government after the company left Chapter 11. Months later, the board forced out the holdover chief executive and replaced him with the chairman. But that chief soon left, opening the door for Mr. Akerson.

G.M. is now under scrutiny for its decade-long failure to disclose deadly safety problems before announcing a big vehicle recall. The Justice Department has begun a criminal investigation into whether the automaker failed to comply with laws requiring timely disclosure of vehicle defects, The New York Times reported this week.

“It is a delight to welcome Dan back to Carlyle,” Daniel A. D’Aniello, the chairman and co-founder of Carlyle, said in a statement. “His remarkable depth of leadership experience will be a great asset to the board and our investment teams.”

Morning Agenda: S.E.C. Takes Aim at Another Former SAC Employee

S.E.C. TAKES AIM AT 10TH FORMER SAC EMPLOYEE  |  The Securities and Exchange Commission’s investigation into Steven A. Cohen’s hedge fund, SAC Capital Advisors, isn’t done just yet. Federal regulators announced on Thursday a civil case against Ronald N. Dennis, who worked for SAC for less than two years, for prompting a number of illegal trades stemming from confidential tips he received about two technology companies, Dell and Foundry Networks, Ben Protess and Matthew Goldstein write in DealBook. Mr. Dennis, the 10th former employee of SAC to face civil or criminal insider trading charges, settled with the S.E.C., agreeing to be banned from the securities industry and to pay $200,000.

The charges are the latest against a former SAC employee and come eight months after the indictment of SAC itself. After the indictment, the inquiry into SAC and Mr. Cohen, who has long been viewed as the target of the investigation, began to lose momentum. The trades at the center of Mr. Dennis’s case allowed SAC to make more than $3 million in profit and avoid losses and were at the heart of the charges against Michael S. Steinberg, the most senior SAC Capital employee convicted.

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT TOO SOFT ON MORTGAGE FRAUD  |  Four years after President Obama promised to crack down on mortgage fraud, his administration has made the crime its lowest priority, closing hundreds of cases after little or no investigation, according to report released on Thursday by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Matt Apuzzo writes in DealBook. The report shows that the F.B.I. considered mortgage fraud, which was one of the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, to be its lowest-ranked national crime priority and that the Justice Department has repeatedly and significantly overstated its efforts to prosecute the crime.

Mr. Apuzzo writes: “The report by the department’s inspector general undercuts the president’s contentions that the government is holding people responsible for the collapse of the financial and housing markets. The administration has been criticized, in particular, for not pursuing large banks and their executives.”

From Bloomberg View’s Jonathan Weil: “The report seems to ignore the reality that the Justice Department and F.B.I. had every incentive to juice their stats, because of the relentless criticism they received over their failure to identify even a single senior Wall Street executive who committed crimes related to the financial crisis. So while it’s helpful to have the audit report, we don’t have the full story of why this particular fiasco happened. Nor did the inspector general’s office release any of the raw evidence it gathered as part of its examination, such as e-mail traffic or other documents.”

G.E. TO SPIN OFF RETAIL FINANCE UNIT  |  General Electric on Thursday filed to spin off its North American retail finance unit in an initial public offering as part of an effort to reduce the size of its GE Capital division, Michael J. de la Merced writes in DealBook. The unit, which handles credit cards for stores, said it planned to rename itself Synchrony Financial. GE Capital at one point brought in just under half of all of G.E.’s revenues.

Mr. de la Merced writes: “By holding a public offering for Synchrony, G.E. will avoid incurring taxes. It is also unlikely that G.E. can find a buyer big enough to acquire the entire business, since the most logical bidders â€" big financial institutions â€" are largely limited in the size of acquisitions they can make.”

G.E. said it planned to sell up to 20 percent of Synchrony in an I.P.O. and distribute the rest of the company to its shareholders next year. The prospectus didn’t provide many details other than a preliminary $100 million fund-raising target meant to determine registration fees.

ON THE AGENDA  |  The producer price index report for February is released at 8:30 a.m. The consumer sentiment index for March is out at 9:55 a.m. Stanley Fischer, the nominee for vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, speaks at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research conference at 9:45 p.m. in Stanford, Calif. Warren E. Buffett is on CNBC at 8 a.m. Dan Gilbert, the chairman of Quicken Loans, is also on CNBC at 8 a.m. Scott M. Stringer the New York City comptroller, is on Bloomberg TV at 8:15 a.m. Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank, is on Bloomberg TV at 10 a.m.

LIONS GATE FINED FOR FENDING OFF ICAHN  |  In 2010, Lions Gate Entertainment successfully defended against a takeover by Carl C. Icahn. But on Thursday, the movie and television company admitted failing to disclose how it stopped him and agreed to pay a $7.5 million penalty to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Floyd Norris writes in DealBook. It was the first time in more than 25 years that the commission had filed an enforcement action for deceiving shareholders in the course of fighting off a hostile tender offer.

The tactics cited by the S.E.C. included a board meeting that began one minute after midnight on the morning of July 20, 2010, just after a standstill agreement with Mr. Icahn had expired. The S.E.C. said that Lions Gate failed to disclose transactions that resulted from the meeting, and lied about others, in proxy materials sent to shareholders that ultimately caused Mr. Icahn to lose a proxy battle to elect a minority slate of directors.

Mergers & Acquisitions »

Singapore Government Firm Pursues Buyout of Olam International  |  The buyout group, led by Temasek Holdings, Singapore’s government investor, has offered Olam a premium of about 12 percent to where the shares first traded, valuing the company at more than $4 billion.
DealBook »

Charter Still Hanging Around Time Warner Cable  |  Charter Communications has yet to withdraw the full slate of directors that it nominated to Time Warner Cable’s board just one day before Comcast swooped in.
DealBook »

Star-Struck by Alibaba’s Movie Company Deal  |  Investors may be betting that Alibaba will move into digital entertainment, but they are too easily excited, Robyn Mak of Reuters Breakingviews writes.
Reuters Breakingviews »

JetBlue to Sell In-Flight Television Business  |  JetBlue Airways announced it would sell its in-flight entertainment business, LiveTV, to Thales Group, a French defense electronics company, for $400 million, Reuters writes. The move is part of the airline’s efforts to cut costs.
REUTERS

Fitch Group Buys Business Monitor International  |  Fitch Group announced on Friday that it had acquired Business Monitor International, an independent provider of country risk and industry analysis, Reuters writes. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
REUTERS

INVESTMENT BANKING »

Investment Bank Chief is UBS’s Top-Paid Executive  |  After leading a turnaround at the investment bank, Andrea Orcel earned about $13 million in 2013, more than Sergio P. Ermotti, the Swiss bank’s chief executive.
DealBook »

Gleacher & Co. Plans to Liquidate  |  The troubled investment bank Gleacher & Company, founded 24 years ago by the longtime Wall Street deal maker Eric Gleacher, had tried unsuccessfully to sell itself and now plans to close up shop.
DealBook »

Liberty Abandons Plan to Buy Rest of Sirius  |  Liberty Media, the company controlled by John C. Malone, announced late Thursday that it had abandoned its plan to buy the shares of SiriusXM that it did not already own as part of a move to set up two tracking stocks to house the company’s assets.
DealBook »

Moody’s Downgrades Royal Bank of Scotland Ratings  |  Moody’s cut R.B.S.’s rating a notch on Thursday in light of the potential difficulties of the British lender’s turnaround plan. The bank reported an £8.2 billion annual loss in 2013 and said it could be three to five years before it recovered.
DealBook »

Barclays to Overhaul Investment Bank  |  Barclays is preparing to shake up its troubled investment bank amid increasing investor concern, The Financial Times writes. The move is expected to result in thousands of job cuts, adding to pressure on the division’s two leaders.
FINANCIAL TIMES

PRIVATE EQUITY »

Charterhouse in Talks to Buy Skillsoft  |  The European buyout firm Charterhouse Capital Partners is nearing a deal to purchase the education software provider Skillsoft for more than $2 billion, Reuters writes, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation.
REUTERS

Britain’s OneSavings Bank Considering I.P.O.  |  OneSavings Bank, the British lender backed by the private equity firm J.C. Flowers, is exploring an initial public offering and is expected to announce on Friday that it has begun preparations for a flotation, The Financial Times writes.
FINANCIAL TIMES

Carlyle and Louis Bacon to Acquire Commodities Firm Traxys  |  The private equity firm Carlyle Group and the trader Louis Bacon have agreed to purchase a controlling stake in the commodities trading firm Traxys Group, The Wall Street Journal reports. The move underscores the increasing allure of commodities middlemen as banks exit the business.
WALL STREET JOURNAL

HEDGE FUNDS »

In Snub to Loeb, Sotheby’s Board Nominates 2 Independent Directors  |  Sotheby’s nominated Jessica Bibliowicz, a financial industry veteran, and Kevin C. Conroy, a senior executive at Univision, saying that the nominees of the hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb added “no relevant expertise” that its board didn’t already have.
DealBook »

A Mixed Week for Ackman  |  William A. Ackman has bet against Herbalife, and its shares tumbled this week. But Mr. Ackman’s firm is also a major stockholder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose shares fell after lawmakers proposed winding down the mortgage giants.
DealBook »

Showtime Orders Hedge Fund Pilot Called ‘Billions’  |  Showtime announced its first drama pilot order of the season Thursday, a project co-created by Andrew Ross Sorkin, an author and financial reporter for The New York Times. The show is called “Billions,” The New York Times writes.
NEW YORK TIMES

I.P.O./OFFERINGS »

ONO Said to Approve I.P.O. Plans  |  Shareholders of the Spanish cable company ONO are said to have approved plans on Thursday for an initial public offering. But on Friday, an unidentified source said that shareholders were close to reaching a deal with the British telecommunications giant Vodafone for around $10 billion including debt, Reuters writes.
REUTERS

Circassia I.P.O. Inspires Optimism for European Health Care  |  The allergy drug specialist Circassia priced at the top of its range in its initial public offering on Thursday, raising $332 million, which fueled optimism about the health care sector across Europe, The Wall Street Journal writes.
WALL STREET JOURNAL

Gambling on Candy Crush  |  Earlier this week, King Digital Entertainment, the maker of the popular game Candy Crush Saga, filed for an initial public offering, but one writer is skeptical of the company’s valuation. “I have no doubt that investors will snap this offering up: the market is willing to value Zynga, which has lost six hundred million dollars over the past three years, at $5 billion. King looks like a bargain by comparison. But this is a pure gamble,” James Surowiecki writes in The New Yorker.
NEW YORKER

VENTURE CAPITAL »

Eventbrite Raises $60 Million  |  Eventbrite, the online ticketing service, said it had raised $60 million in financing led by Tiger Global and T. Rowe Price, Reuters writes. The new funding tempered expectations that the company would hold an initial public offering this year.
REUTERS

Lemon Digital Wallet Founder Gets $20 Million for Bitcoin Start-Up  |  Wences Casares, who sold his Lemon digital wallet platform for $43 million last year, has secured $20 million to fund a new Bitcoin wallet and vault start-up called Xapo, ReCode reports.
RECODE

Payment Start-Up Clinkle Tries to Move Past Stumbles  |  The payment start-up Clinkle seemed to be doing well, raising $25 million in 2013 and attracting interest from high-profile investors, including Peter Thiel, an early backer of Facebook. Now, the company is trying to get back on track after recent troubles that included employee departures and a security breach, Bloomberg Businessweek writes.
BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK

LEGAL/REGULATORY »

UBS Attempted to Rig Interest Rate, Hong Kong Regulator Finds  |  The main banking regulator said it discovered that from 2006 to 2009, about 100 internal chat messages attempting to rig the interest rate had been sent by UBS traders to the employee who was responsible for making submissions on the bank’s behalf.
DealBook »

Bank of England Seeks to Expand Clawback Rules  |  The Bank of England is proposing new rules requiring bankers who engage in wrongdoing and their supervisors to return their bonuses for up to six years.
DealBook »

Draghi Praises European Banks That Are Cleaning Up Their Books  |  The president of the European Central Bank said in a speech on Thursday said that just the prospect of scrutiny by the E.C.B. “has already caused banks to raise new capital” and shed unprofitable assets.
DealBook »

Another Proposal to Repair Relations Between Boards and Investors  |  The Conference Board, working with a rival group of Wall Street advisers, has issued recommendations aimed at improving the public’s trust in big business.
DealBook »

At Hearing, Fed Board Nominees Endorse Current Path  |  Stanley Fischer, Lael Brainard and Jerome H. Powell stood by the Federal Reserve’s efforts to reduce unemployment, The New York Times writes.
NEW YORK TIMES

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Complains to Obama Over Government Spying  |  In a public post on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said the United States government “should be the champion for the Internet, not a threat.” He said he called the president on Wednesday to complain about the latest revelations of spying by the National Security Agency, the Bits blog writes.
NEW YORK TIMES BITS

UBS Attempted to Rig Interest Rate, Hong Kong Regulator Finds

HONG KONG â€" Hong Kong’s main banking regulator on Friday released the results of an investigation that found that traders at the Swiss bank UBS attempted to rig a local benchmark interest rate over a four-year period.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority said that after an investigation of nine banks that were part of the local consortium making daily submissions to determine the Hong Kong Interbank Offered Rate â€" which is used as a benchmark to price corporate loans, household mortgages and other types of debt â€" only UBS was found to have attempted to manipulate the rate.

The authority said it discovered that between September 2006 and June 2009, about 100 internal chat messages attempting to rig the interest rate had been sent by UBS traders to the employee who was responsible for making submissions on the bank’s behalf.

However, only about a third of these rate-rigging requests affected the submissions that UBS actually made, the regulator found. Moreover, because UBS acted alone and was not conspiring with other banks to rig rates â€" a situation that proved to be the case in other financial markets, like London â€" the monetary authority found that UBS’s actions ultimately had no impact on how the Hong Kong rate was set each day.

As a result, the monetary authority did not issue a fine against UBS as an institution or impose other punitive measures on the bank. Instead, the authority said it would require that UBS implement a plan within the next six months to correct weaknesses in its governance and internal controls.

In addition, the authority said it had required UBS to discipline the individual staff members found to have been responsible for misconduct. Six traders who attempted to rig rates have since left the bank, as has the employee who was responsible for submitting rates, the authority said.

“The bank has cooperated with the H.K.M.A.’s investigation and agreed to comply with the requirements by taking appropriate follow-up actions promptly,” the regulator said Friday in a statement. “The case is a clear reminder to all banks of their duty to uphold robust internal controls and governance and to take adequate measures to prevent and detect internal improprieties.”

In 2012, UBS was fined $1.5 billion by American and British regulators over rate rigging. In addition, the Swiss bank pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the United States over rate rigging carried out by its Japanese unit.

Investment Bank Chief is UBS’s Top-Paid Executive

LONDON - The head of UBS’s investment bank was the company’s highest-paid executive in 2013, earning more than Sergio P. Ermotti, the Swiss lender’s chief executive, according to its annual report released on Friday.

Andrea Orcel received 11.4 million Swiss francs, or about $13 million, last year, including a base salary of 1.5 million Swiss francs and a cash bonus of 1 million Swiss francs. The bulk of his compensation was in company stock.

Mr. Ermotti received 10.7 million Swiss francs, including a base salary of 2.5 million Swiss francs and a cash bonus of 1 million Swiss francs. He received 8.9 million Swiss francs in total compensation in 2012, when he was the highest-paid executive.

The bank also disclosed that it is examining its precious-metals business as part of an internal review of its foreign exchange operations amid a series of investigations by regulators into potential manipulation of the currency markets.

Mr. Orcel was named the sole chief executive of the investment bank in November 2012 after joining UBS from Bank of America Merrill Lynch in July of that year.

“He guided the business and its employees through a period of intense and sometimes challenging transformation following the announcement of the acceleration of the implementation of the firm’s strategy in late 2012,” UBS said.

The bank cut 10,000 jobs in 2012 as part of an effort to transform itself into a smaller, more profitable firm focused on wealth management and away from more risky trading activity in its investment bank.

In 2013, UBS reported profit of 3.17 billion Swiss francs, compared with a loss of 2.48 billion Swiss francs in the previous year.

In the annual report, the bank cited the strong financial performance under Mr. Ermotti and “progress towards the successful implementation of the firm’s ambitious strategy â€" a strategy focused on sustainable performance, best-in-class capital ratios, and vigilance on operational risk and on effectiveness and efficiency.”

The escalating pay of bankers has been a key concern for politicians in Europe as they try to discourage riskier behavior from financial institutions.

Last week, the European Commission adopted a framework for bonus caps for bank employees.

On Thursday, the Bank of England unveiled proposals to expand its ability to claw back bonuses from bankers and their bosses for up to six years when there is either misconduct, actions that lead to significant losses or failures of risk management.

In noting the internal review of its foreign exchange operations, UBS said that “a number of authorities also are reportedly investigating potential manipulation of precious metal prices” and that it is cooperating with the authorities.

As part of an investigation into the potential manipulation of the $5 trillion-a-day foreign exchange market, British regulators have been looking into whether global benchmarks tied to gold trading were improperly influenced, according to people familiar with the matter.

More than 20 traders have been placed on leave or fired as a result of internal investigations at several large institutions in foreign exchange trading, including Barclays, JPMorgan Chase and UBS.

Deutsche Bank, the largest player in the currency trading market, with a share of about 15 percent, and Citigroup have fired employees as a result of their own investigations.

The Bank of England recently suspended a staff member pending the outcome of an investigation into whether the employee complied with its internal control processes. The central bank is facing questions about whether its employees knew of or condoned any manipulation of the currency markets.

The Bank of England has said its internal review has found no evidence that staff members colluded to manipulate the currency markets or to share confidential client information.

None of the banks or the suspended or fired traders have been accused of wrongdoing by the authorities.