Business news in brief

Ex-worker bilked Tyson out of $551,343

A former Tyson Foods employee pleaded guilty Friday to defrauding the company of more than $500,000.

"Tyson Foods, Inc., held the defendant, Brenda Blair, in high regard and she was a trusted employee of the company prior to the discovery of her later scheme to defraud," according to the documents filed with the court.

U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks tentatively accepted Blair's plea in Fayetteville, said Herbert Southern, Blair's attorney.

"The key word is tentatively," he said.

Southern said the plea will be accepted officially when Blair's sentence is decided four months from now.

Blair worked at Tyson for more than 25 years as the manager of the Pre-65 Retiree Health Insurance Benefits Plan. According to court documents, she used her access to the retirement benefits plan to devise her scheme as early as June 2005. It ran until Sept. 19, 2014.

Blair received $551,343.42 that she was not entitled to through the scheme, according to a Department of Justice news release.

Blair generated fraudulent wire transfers using the names of actual participants of the plan and used her own bank accounts as the receiving accounts of those wire transfers. She told investigating agents that no one else participated in the scheme.

"We're aware of the indictment and have been cooperating with the U.S. attorney's office's investigation," said Worth Sparkman, spokesman for Tyson.

-- Claire Williams

Microsoft weighs headquarters revamp

SEATTLE -- Microsoft is considering a multibillion-dollar revamp of its headquarters campus in suburban Seattle, seeking to foster more collaboration among employees and attract young engineers, according to people with knowledge of the plans.

The software giant has hired architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill as part of the effort at its Redmond, Wash., offices, said the people, who asked not to be named because the plans aren't public. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed Dubai's Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, and is helping Microsoft with a makeover of its much smaller campus in Mountain View, Calif.

Microsoft hasn't decided whether to move forward with the Redmond overhaul, said one of the people familiar with the matter.

"We continually work on Microsoft campus plans to anticipate future needs," the company said in a statement.

A representative at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's San Francisco office did not return calls and emails for comment.

The potential updates would be aimed at shifting away from private offices toward the more open-plan work spaces that are favored by today's technology companies, said the people. Microsoft has been in Redmond since shortly before going public in 1986, a time when suburban campuses were popular. It now occupies about 80 buildings on roughly 500 acres.

-- The Associated Press

Russia: 37 'kamikaze' lenders shut down

Russia shut down 37 lenders it deemed to be running "kamikaze" businesses focused on dubious operations, or two-thirds of the 55 it has closed this year, according to central bank Deputy Governor Mikhail Sukhov.

"We won't be rescuing banks for which shadow business and dubious operations serve as their basis," Sukhov said at a forum in Sochi, Russia, on Friday. "Fortunately, the number of such banks is decreasing."

The central bank has been sweeping away lenders it considers mismanaged at a record pace as it fights questionable capital transactions amid the country's first recession in six years. The number of operating lenders in Russia dropped to 727 at the end of July from 783 at the start of the year, central bank data show.

Governor Elvira Nabiullina is using the crackdown on risky lending amid suspicions that such practices were involved in financing terrorism or used to enable money laundering. The regulator in July pulled the most licenses since Nabiullina took office in June 2013.

More than 4,100 individuals have been blacklisted on suspicion of engaging in risky operations that resulted in bank failures, Sukhov said.

-- Bloomberg News

Prices prompt farmers' trip to Brussels

Thousands of farmers are heading toward Brussels before a meeting next week of European ministers set to discuss plunging prices for milk, meat, fruit and vegetables.

About 4,000 farmers will gather along with hundreds of tractors Monday as ministers debate potential agriculture support measures, said Pekka Pesonen, secretary general of Brussels-based farm lobby Copa-Cogeca. A Russian ban on many European Union food exports, slowing demand from China and oversupply of milk and pork products mean many farmers are losing money and may go out of business, he said.

European milk prices have fallen about 20 percent in the past year, industry data show, sparking farmer protests this summer from the U.K. to Lithuania. French farmers blockaded parts of Paris on Thursday, and trading on the country's benchmark pig market in Brittany was disrupted last month when buyers and sellers couldn't agree on prices.

"We need European institutions to come up with a plan to immediately alleviate the problems that we face," Pesonen said by phone Friday. "This is about true concerns that farmers are having about their economic survival."

-- Bloomberg News

Indonesia scraps high-speed rail plan

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Indonesia has dropped its plan to build a high-speed train line and is shifting instead to more economical medium-speed technology, a Cabinet minister said Friday.

Coordinating Minister of Economy Darmin Nasution said high-speed service is not suitable for the relatively short distance of 93 miles between Jakarta and Bandung, West Java's provincial capital.

"The president's decision is that we don't need a high-speed railway. A medium speed of 200 to 250 kilometers per hour [124 mph to 155 mph] is enough," Nasution said.

President Joko Widodo, who took office in October, has plans for improving Indonesia's infrastructure, which he says will attract more manufacturing business and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

Nasution said a medium-speed rail system would take only 11 minutes more than a high-speed system to make the trip, while its construction cost would be about 40 percent cheaper.

-- Bloomberg News

Business on 09/05/2015

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