Can Grocery Delivery for the Poor Soar in the Coronavirus Era?

SOUTH AFRICA

As the Imizamo Yethu informal settlement in Cape Town was engulfed by flames one night in March 2017, Jessica Boonstra watched from her home nearby. “It was so close I could hear their screams,” she remembers. With government intervention sorely lacking, Boonstra, 43, volunteered with the local Thula Thula relief organization. Using her retail and logistics background, she developed an app to register people in need. Within days they had developed an emergency supply chain that could feed 15,000 people “in a fairly orderly fashion.”

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A few months later, she gathered a few of the people who’d been instrumental in the relief efforts. “We’ve showed that this is possible as a charity,” she told them. “What’s stopping us from doing it as a business?”

Yebo Fresh, the one-of-a-kind online retailer born out of the ashes of those fires, gives its 1,000 clients (and counting) across seven informal settlements in Cape Town the chance to enjoy twice-weekly grocery deliveries. With prices comparable to those in brick-and-mortar stores and no delivery fee on large orders, the service is saving women (it’s almost always women) as much as $7 in public transport costs per order and freeing up entire Saturdays (it’s almost always Saturday) that would previously have been spent scouring the city for the best deals. 

Until now, the company has been focusing on perfecting its model, but the declaration of a COVID-19-inspired State of Disaster has forced Boonstra to put Yebo Fresh’s business model to the test sooner than planned. Thirty million South Africans live in areas not serviced by mainstream grocery retailers. “This could be our finest hour or a total disaster,” she says, clearly a little daunted by the fact that next week’s order will be 10 times bigger than any the company has ever attempted. (They’ve even had to rent a second warehouse.)

Mark Forrester — founder of the WooCommerce plugin used by Yebo Fresh and one of Boonstra’s seed investors — has no such doubts. “I saw fantastic opportunity when I first looked at Jessica’s skill set, a wonderfully creative, Africa-centric use case of our e-commerce platform, and her agile business model,” he says. “I have no doubt her business can step up to the challenge of feeding Cape Town’s most vulnerable people during this crisis.” They aim to squeeze profits from a lower overhead, with no retail space, only 10 full-time staff and deliveries just twice a week.

Growing up in a tiny seaside village in the Netherlands in a family of problem-solving engineers, Boonstra stood out from her more pragmatic relatives by always being “the one who wanted to save birds who flew into windows.” But she is no pie-in-the-sky idealist. After completing a degree in technology and policy (which included an internship in Tanzania, where she fell “head over heels” in love with Africa), she landed a job at energy giant Shell. Seven years later, she was recruited by Dutch retailer Albert Heijn, which soon had her leading its online business development — a task she performed with such aplomb that the company is now head and shoulders above the online competition in the Netherlands.

Despite all the career success, something was missing for Boonstra and her husband. “Any chance we got, we’d put the [three] kids in their backpacks and head to Africa,” she says. In 2014, they took a four-month sabbatical to Ethiopia, and it was there — sitting atop a mountain — that they decided to make a permanent move to the continent.

Within months, they’d quit their jobs and moved to Cape Town. “We were very optimistic,” remembers Boonstra. “I had retail skills, my husband was a solar energy expert, we’d both been headhunted all over the place in Holland.” Yet after a year and a half of job hunting, they had to start selling off their kids’ Legos. Eventually, hubby René Laks found employment with a solar firm and Boonstra landed consulting gigs with clients ranging from momtrepreneurs she’d met in the school parking lot to multinational retailers. (In between all of this, she found the time to make Buzzer, a security app that has already saved a few lives.)

While consulting with several big retailers, she was struck by their seemingly unanimous fear of the mass market. “No one disputed the size of the opportunity,” recalls Boonstra. “But they all saw it as too messy [no money] and too dangerous.” Instead, they focused their online attentions on the middle class and left poor South Africans to continue shopping the way they’d always done — using expensive public transport to traipse around cities designed according to apartheid, with most stores in formerly whites-only areas.

Which brings us to Yebo Fresh’s debut after the 2017 fires. The company now operates from a warehouse near the airport and eight of the core team of 10 actually live in the communities it serves. “Jessica treats us like family and she always asks for our input,” says Faith Depa, Yebo Fresh’s customer service manager. Depa’s fingerprints are all over the company’s catalog, for example, which is big on the kind of combo deals that appeal to their clientele. 

It also combines low and high tech seamlessly. Orders can be completed on old-fashioned paper checklists taken from door-to-door sales agents, via WhatsApp or through a conventional website — but they’re all digitized and synced with a payment gateway. Most customers prefer to pay upon receipt, using debit cards or cash (not encouraged, for safety reasons).

Of course, there have been challenges. “Some people were even scared of being robbed by the driver,” says Depa. “But the more time we spend walking the streets, the more they trust us.” The team also has to meet customers’ extremely high expectations. “In the beginning, I thought it would be all about price,” Boonstra reflects. “But if you only have enough cash for five onions, you can’t afford to pay for a rotten one.”

All these lessons, Boonstra reckons, only serve to make the company stronger. “At the moment, we are just trying to keep up with demand in Cape Town during the coronavirus,” she says. “But there’s a whole continent of people facing the same weekly issues. The problem is just gigantic.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/causes/can-grocery-delivery-for-the-poor-soar-in-the-coronavirus-era/ar-BB11F4Ea?li=BBUPk4T

Walmart Was Almost Charged Criminally Over Opioids. Trump Appointees Killed the Indictment.

by Jesse Eisinger and James Bandler 3/25/2020 © Prvidoed by ProPublica

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On a Tuesday just before Halloween in 2018, a group of federal prosecutors and agents from Texas arrived in Washington. For almost two years, they’d been investigating the opioid dispensing practices of Walmart, the largest company in the world. They had amassed what they viewed as highly damning evidence only to face a major obstacle: top Trump appointees at the Department of Justice.

The prosecution team had come to Washington to try to save its case. Joe Brown, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, led the group, which included Heather Rattan, an over-20-year veteran of the office who had spent much of her career prosecuting members of drug cartels.

They first went to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s headquarters to meet the acting administrator, Uttam Dhillon. There Rattan laid out the evidence. Opioids dispensed by Walmart pharmacies in Texas had killed customers who had overdosed. The pharmacists who dispensed those opioids had told the company they didn’t want to fill the prescriptions because they were coming from doctors who were running pill mills. They pleaded for help and guidance from Walmart’s corporate office.

Investigators had obtained records of similar cries for help from Walmart pharmacists all over the country: from Maine, North Carolina, Kansas and Washington, and other states. They reported hundreds of thousands of suspicious or inappropriate opioid prescriptions. One Walmart employee warned about a Florida doctor who had a “list of patients from Kentucky that have been visiting pharmacies in all of central Wisconsin recently.” That doctor had sent patients to Walmarts in more than 30 other states.

In response to these alarms, Walmart compliance officials did not take corporate-wide action to halt the flow of opioids. Instead, they repeatedly admonished pharmacists that they could not cut off any doctor entirely. They could only evaluate each prescription on an individual basis. And they went further. An opioid compliance manager told an executive in an email, gathered during the inquiry and viewed by ProPublica, that Walmart’s focus should be on “driving sales.”

After they finished their presentation, Dhillon sat back in his chair and exclaimed, “Jesus Christ,” according to five people familiar with the investigation. “Why aren’t we talking about this as a criminal case?”

That’s precisely what had occurred seven months earlier: Rattan had informed Walmart that she was preparing to indict the corporation for violating the Controlled Substances Act. Indictments of Fortune 500 companies are unheard of, let alone of one with $500 billion in annual revenue and over 2 million employees. But Rattan, with support from her boss Brown, believed the evidence justified such an unprecedented step.

Before the Texas prosecutors could file their case, however, Walmart escalated concerns to high-ranking officials at the DOJ, who then intervened. Brown was ordered to stand down. On Aug. 31, 2018, Trump officials officially informed Walmart that the DOJ would decline to prosecute the company, according to a letter from Walmart’s lawyer that lays out the chronology of the case.

Vice President Mike Pence wants the private sector to donate critical medical supplies to help during the coronavirus pandemic. But the White House’s chaotic requests have not included consistent information on how exactly businesses can do that.

But the Texas prosecutors hadn’t given up. Now, two months later, they still thought they had a chance to bring the then-deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, and other top officials around. After the first presentation at the DEA offices that day, the Texas group — now accompanied by the DEA’s Dhillon — caravanned over to the DOJ.

They filed into a big, bright conference room, where they were received by Rosenstein and a collection of political appointees and career staff. Rattan and her team were given a half-hour to make their presentation. She explained that dispensing opioids without a legitimate medical purpose is legally akin to dealing heroin. Criminal law says if a person or entity is willfully blind or deliberately ignorant, they are as liable as if they had acted intentionally. Once Walmart’s headquarters knew its pharmacists were raising alarms about suspicious prescriptions, but the compliance department continued to allow — even push — them to fill them, well, that made the company guilty, the Texas prosecutors contended.

This was not a question of a few rogue employees, Rattan explained. Walmart had a national problem. Worse, the prosecutors contended, the company was a repeat offender. Walmart had agreed to a settlement with the DEA seven years earlier in which it had promised to improve its controls over the abuse of opioid prescriptions. Still the problems persisted. That’s why the prosecutors believed they needed to pursue the extraordinary path of a criminal prosecution. As they concluded, Brown was emphatic, telling Rosenstein: “We have to act.”

A fine would not be a sufficient deterrent, the DEA’s Dhillon added, since Walmart “has more money than it knows what to do with.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” Rosenstein responded, according to five people familiar with the investigation. “We are all capitalists here.”

Rosenstein’s quip brought the prosecutorial team up short. They weren’t pursuing Walmart because it was profitable but because, in their view, the company had put its customers at deadly risk.

Not long after, Rosenstein’s assistant entered the room to say he had a call. He left. The prosecutors’ push to persuade Rosenstein to revive the criminal case had failed.

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Still, there were multiple avenues left to pursue: After the meeting, the Texas prosecutors focused on bringing criminal charges against individual employees, as Rosenstein and other Trump DOJ officials directed them to do. But later, when the prosecutors sought to indict a mid-level Walmart manager, the Trump officials blocked that, too.

That left potential civil claims. After the meeting with Rosenstein, Brian Benczkowski, the head of the criminal division, had told Brown, “You have a whopper of a civil case,” according to four people familiar with the investigation.

But the civil case, too, was stymied by Trump appointees in the DOJ who continued to side with Walmart.

In its dealings with the DOJ, Walmart pursued a classic strategy. It relied on Jones Day, an influential law firm that has salted officials throughout the Trump administration. Walmart conceded mistakes and opened the door for a civil settlement. But the company consistently denied that any of its employees committed crimes.

In the view of many prosecutors and agents, Walmart never fully cooperated. (From the beginning of the investigation, Walmart said it was cooperating and taking action to fix its opioid dispensing practices. Still, the company acknowledged that it halted its cooperation in mid-2018 after it became convinced prosecutors were not acting in good faith.)

And Walmart and Jones Day added a Trumpian tactic: At a moment when the president had established a habit of attacking the investigators in his own government, the company followed a similarly aggressive approach. Walmart lawyers complained to Washington about the Texas prosecutors, accusing them of seeking to “embarrass” the company while using the threat of criminal charges to extort a larger civil fine. Criminal and civil investigations can run in parallel, but it’s an ethical violation for prosecutors to use the threat of criminal penalties to generate a higher civil settlement.

In a statement to ProPublica, Walmart spokesman Randy Hargrove reiterated the company’s complaints: “The United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas (EDTX) engaged in misconduct multiple times as it investigated Walmart, including threatening to bring meritless criminal charges against Walmart in order to extort an unjustified civil settlement from the company. This behavior was clearly improper, violated the Department of Justice’s own internal policies and rules of legal ethics, and was entirely inconsistent with the Department’s long-standing policies.”

Hargove added that having failed to bring “baseless” criminal charges against the company, “It appears that one or more individuals familiar with EDTX’s investigation have violated Department of Justice rules in an attempt to achieve through leaks what they could not accomplish in a court of law.”

In response to the Walmart statement, the U.S. attorney, Brown, offered his own to ProPublica: “Drug Enforcement Agency investigations of multiple opioid overdose deaths in the Eastern District of Texas resulted in our office opening parallel civil and criminal investigations of Walmart’s pharmacy practices. These investigations have been handled appropriately, and according to Department of Justice policy. These investigations, which we would typically not confirm or deny, but do so now because of Walmart’s statement, continue. Accordingly, it would be inappropriate to comment further on the specific facts of the case.

“Walmart chooses now to attack the investigators, a tried and true method to avoid oversight. We are confident that once all of the facts in this matter are public the hollowness of this criticism will be apparent. It is not the goal of our office to embarrass Walmart. Walmart’s behavior in dispensing opioid medication in the middle of a public health crisis should embarrass Walmart.”

Walmart’s ability to go over the heads of the Texas office left the U.S. attorney’s team profoundly frustrated — so much so that the lead civil prosecutor on the case resigned in protest on Oct. 25, 2019. “I deeply regret that Department leadership prevented EDTX from filing its lawsuit in 2018,” Joshua Russ, then the head of the Eastern District’s civil division, wrote in his resignation letter, a copy of which (with Walmart’s name blacked out) ProPublica obtained. “Corporations cannot poison Americans with impunity. Good sense dictates stern and swift action when Americans die.”

The investigations of Walmart have not been previously reported. This account is based on hundreds of pages of Walmart internal emails and investigative documents, correspondence between the company’s attorneys and the Justice Department, and interviews with nine people familiar with the investigation. All of the conversations described in this article were recounted either in those documents or by multiple people with knowledge of the conversations. The DOJ declined to make anyone available for interviews and did not answer an extensive list of questions.

The news of the Walmart investigation comes at a time when the Trump administration is being assailed for legal favoritism and cronyism. Attorney General Bill Barr has inserted himself into multiple investigations of Trump friends and associates. In February, four prosecutors on the case of Roger Stone, a Trump friend and adviser, quit the case in protest after political appointees undercut their sentencing recommendation.

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The Trump DOJ has also pulled back on white-collar and corporate investigations and prosecutions. White-collar prosecutions are at a record low. Walmart itself seems to have already benefited from the Trump administration’s approach to corporate misconduct. The company was the subject of a seven-year investigation into bribery allegations in Mexico and around the globe. The Obama administration sought $600 million in fines, according to The New York Times, which broke the story, but failed to reach a resolution with the company. The Trump DOJ settled the charges for $282 million in June 2019. (“Walmart took the investigation very seriously, cooperated with the DOJ and the SEC’s investigation, and took extensive steps that have established its comprehensive Global Anti-Corruption Program,” the company said.)

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Even as Trump’s DOJ was preventing its own prosecutors from getting tough on Walmart, the Trump administration told the public it was confronting the nation’s opioid crisis. In March 2018, Trump said his administration would hold those responsible accountable, pledging that federal lawsuits against opioid drugmakers “will happen.” The same month that Rosenstein declined to revive the criminal case against Walmart, Trump signed legislation aimed at curbing the opioid crisis. A key element was a public-private partnership with several companies, including Walmart, to implement measures such as opioid addiction education initiatives. “Together we are going to end the scourge of drug addiction in America,” Trump said. (This month, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon appeared in the White House’s Rose Garden to pledge the company’s help in combating the coronavirus.)

For those who spent years investigating Walmart, the chasm between the public posturing and the behavior behind closed doors has been deeply discouraging. By the end of the experience, one said: “I wanted to ask for a Walmart greeter badge. It’s got much more stroke than a DEA badge.”

The case against Walmart originated in the summer of 2016, with an investigation of two Texas doctors, Howard Diamond and Randall Wade, who were prescribing opioids on a vast scale. Prosecutors would link each to multiple deaths. The lead prosecutor on the criminal case, Rattan, made it clear to the DEA agents on the case that this should be run like any drug investigation. They should focus on cutting off the dealers’ sources of drugs.

One of those was Walmart. In August, DEA agents, surveilling Wade’s clinic, followed three women to a Walmart in McKinney, Texas. Shortly afterward, all three walked out with large quantities of painkillers.

On Dec. 7, 2016, DEA agents raided that Walmart, seeking records about Diamond and Wade. The two doctors were eventually convicted of illegal distribution of opioids, with Wade sentenced to 10 years in prison and Diamond 20 years.

Walmart has the fifth-highest pharmacy revenue in the country and was the fifth-largest opioid distributor in Texas from 2006-14, according to the DEA. But Walmart pharmacies had not been raided before; raids of Fortune 500 companies are exceedingly rare. Alarmed, Walmart’s lawyers quickly asked the government to conduct no more raids and pledged full cooperation.

The Texas prosecutors broadened their investigation and began to amass evidence that extended far beyond Diamond and Wade. Between 2011 to 2017, they discovered, Walmart pharmacists repeatedly filled prescriptions that they worried were not for legitimate medical purposes, including large doses of opioids and mixtures of drugs the DEA considered red flags for abuse. Walmart pharmacists not just in Texas but in Maine, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Kansas and Washington state raised alarms to the company’s national compliance department about doctors.

Sometimes, these pharmacists requested permission to stop filling opioid prescriptions for certain doctors. In February 2015, a pharmacist wrote to the national compliance department about Diamond:

“We are all concerned about our jobs and about filling for a pill mill doctor. I’m in my 29th year with walmart and have never had a situation this bad with a doctor. Other chains are refusing to fill for him which makes our burden even greater. Please help us.”

Another wrote that same month:

“doctor Diamond is a problem and a liability on us...

Filling for him is a risk that keeps me up at night. This is a serious situation.”

But even after more than a decade of soaring addiction and deaths had transformed opioids into a national crisis, Walmart had a policy that pharmacists could conduct no “blanket refusals” that shut off prescriptions written by a particular doctor. Nor would Walmart put doctors on a prohibited list from headquarters, known as a “corporate block.”

Some of Walmart’s competitors had stopped filling Diamond’s and Wade’s prescriptions, company pharmacists told headquarters. Why wasn’t Walmart doing the same? In February 2014, for example, Kroger sent a letter to Diamond saying it would no longer fill his controlled substances prescriptions. Walmart pharmacists were telling headquarters that CVS, Walgreens and Target were doing the same. (A CVS spokesman said the company implemented a policy of corporate blocks several years ago but, citing privacy, declined to comment on whether the policy was applied to Diamond and Wade. Spokespeople for Kroger, Walgreens and Target did not respond to requests for comment. Walmart insists there is no evidence that competitors issued corporate blocks against Diamond and Wade.)

A Walmart pharmacist in September 2016 wrote an alarmed note about a Pennsylvania doctor who was “under investigation by the DEA for what we believe is a pill mill operation.” He added:

“Rite Aid has sent him a blanket denial letter. ...

And since then we have seen our almost solely narcotic and controlled prescriptions from him double....

We are putting pharmacists and Walmart in a bad situation legally....”

Instead of blanket refusals or a corporate block, Walmart’s compliance department said each prescription had to be evaluated separately. To block a prescription and report the refusal, a pharmacist had to fill out a form that could take 20 minutes, a bureaucratic hurdle that pharmacists sought to avoid because they were under pressure to fill prescriptions quickly.

From early 2014 to when Walmart finally blocked Diamond in March 2017 — after the federal investigation had started — the company’s pharmacists filled over 13,000 controlled substances prescriptions from Diamond, an average of 11 a day, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica. That amounted to over 1.3 million doses. Walmart only blocked Wade in November 2016, a month after he was indicted. Between the first Walmart employee’s alarm and then, Walmart pharmacies filled an average of nine controlled substance prescriptions a day written by Wade, amounting to 875,000 doses. Between 2011 and 2016, over 100 different Walmart pharmacies in 17 different states filled Wade’s opioid prescriptions.

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More troubling to the federal investigators, for much of this period, Walmart was operating under a secret settlement, known as a Memorandum of Agreement, with the DEA, reached in 2011 and running four years. (The existence of the MOA has not been previously reported.) According to that agreement, a Walmart pharmacy in California had been filling prescriptions “for other than a legitimate medical purpose and/or outside the usual course of professional practice in violation of federal and state law” and had “dispensed controlled substances to individuals that [the pharmacy] knew or should have known were diverting the controlled substances.”

A decade ago, the government spent more than $1 trillion to bail out companies and stimulate the economy. What have we learned since then?

As part of the agreement, in which Walmart did not admit or deny wrongdoing, the company agreed to install national procedures to identify bad prescribers and prescriptions not written for legitimate medical purposes and report them quickly to the DEA.

In addition, Walmart had repeatedly run afoul of the Controlled Substances Act. The company had received more than 50 “Letters of Admonition” from the DEA for its prescribing practices from 2000 to 2018, according to records obtained by ProPublica. And it had paid two small Controlled Substances Act settlements in 2007 and 2008, one for filling unlawful prescriptions and the other for recordkeeping violations.

Prosecutors believed that Walmart was not fulfilling the terms of its agreement with the DEA. The company had an internal system for compiling pharmacists’ “refusals to fill” that it would send to the DEA. They found that Walmart didn’t always send the DEA its alerts. When the company did so, the notices were not complete. The form included a comments field, where pharmacists might write notes flagging concerns about doctors whom they believed were operating pill mills. Walmart sent the DEA the information that a prescription had been refused but excised the employee comments.

On Feb. 13, 2015, when a regional manager received a list of “Refusal to Fill” prescriptions from headquarters, he asked, “Does your team pull out any insights from these we need to highlight?” according to an email reviewed by ProPublica.

Brad Nelson, then a director of Health and Wellness Practice Compliance at Walmart, wrote back:

“The MOA that requires the reporting of the Refusal to fills expires in 30 days. We have not invested a great amount of effort in doing analysis on the data since the agreement is virtually over. Driving sales and patient awareness is a far better use of our Market Directors and Market manager’s time.”

Walmart maintains that Nelson was expressing relief that the onerous burden of alerting the DEA to its refusals to fill was coming to an end, and that in urging the manager to “drive sales,” he was referring to immunizations. Walmart depicted Nelson as a popular middle manager who was the first in the office every morning. He’d come in at 4:30 or 5 a.m. and spend the next three hours faxing refusals to fill to the DEA. Then he would make popcorn for his colleagues.

On Jan. 8, 2015, Nelson emailed colleagues that a pharmacist had contacted him with concerns, indicating “that he is feeling pressured” by his supervisor to fill prescriptions for controlled substances. If the pharmacist doesn’t fill the prescriptions, Nelson added, “then that would be a significant issue.”

Walmart says this email shows that Nelson was consistent: Pharmacists could not issue blanket refusals but could refuse prescriptions on a case-by-case basis. (Nelson referred questions to his lawyer, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

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After ProPublica’s report that Richard Burr dumped stocks after reassuring the public about coronavirus readiness, he said he welcomed an ethics investigation.

Walmart told the investigators that the evidence the Eastern District compiled was misleading. The company said the DEA never required “corporate blocks” or “blanket refusals-to-fill.” The DEA did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.

Meanwhile, some state boards of pharmacy and medical boards protected doctors from being cut off by pharmacies on the grounds that companies should not interfere with the doctor-patient relationship, Walmart says.

For its part, Texas has no rules that would prohibit a pharmacy chain like Walmart from instituting a corporate block or blanket refusal policy, said Allison Benz, executive director of the Texas State Board of Pharmacy.

In Texas, pharmacy chains may, indeed, impose corporate-wide blocks on doctors whom they suspect are running pill mills, according to Sherif Zaafran, president of the Texas Medical Board. Zaafran said the board has told Walmart and other pharmacies that if they have concerns about a doctor, they have a legal obligation to file a complaint with the board while providing information supporting their concerns. “We never weigh in on a corporate block,” he said. “The corporation can instruct a licensed pharmacist to do so. It is the licensed pharmacist who has the legal ability to not dispense something.”

For its part, Walmart says it was taking its responsibilities seriously. The company says it flagged over 60,000 concerning prescriptions its pharmacists refused to fill during the period the investigation covered. It maintains Nelson was vigilant in urging his pharmacists to refuse to fill if they saw prescriptions they did not like, and to fill out the forms so that the company could send the information to the DEA. In the case of Diamond, Walmart says one of its pharmacists alerted the Texas Medical Board of its concerns. The board allowed Diamond to continue practicing medicine, finding that his “prescribing was appropriate.” (It did place him on a “remedial plan” to fix his allegedly sloppy record-keeping.) The board did not revoke Diamond’s license until October 2017, after his arrest.

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The company argues that, as the regulatory entity that licensed doctors to dispense opioids, the DEA, not Walmart, was responsible for the failure to shut down pill pushers like Diamond sooner. After the investigation started, Walmart reversed itself and began instituting corporate blocks, which suggested to prosecutors that the company could have been doing so all along. Since Walmart began the policy, multiple states have assailed and even investigated Walmart for improperly interfering with doctors’ decisions.

The prosecutors did not find Walmart’s many explanations convincing. The fact that the company had sent so many refusals to the DEA for a given doctor and yet would turn around and keep filling prescriptions for the very same sketchy physician suggested the problem was widespread. As far as federal prosecutors and the DEA were concerned, the MOA had placed Walmart on parole — and the company had violated its terms.

In the spring of 2018, the Eastern District of Texas informed Walmart that it was preparing criminal charges against the company. In traditional criminal investigations against individuals, indictments often come as a surprise. The government accumulates evidence and makes its arrest. The defense eventually sees the evidence and can respond then, sometimes only at trial.

Criminal investigations of big corporations don’t typically work that way in the United States. They have developed into a ritualized series of give-and-takes between prosecutors and the company. Prosecutors lay out their evidence and theories and the company gets the opportunity to respond in great detail — all out of public view. The Eastern District of Texas skipped this dance.

Stunned and worried, Walmart requested a meeting with the prosecutors. In April 2018, the two sides sat down.

Walmart had a powerful team. Karen Hewitt, the partner-in-charge of Jones Day’s California region, was the company’s lead outside lawyer. She had been the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of California, appointed by George W. Bush and then serving under President Barack Obama, accumulating a record for prosecuting corrupt politicians and drug and border crimes. Walmart’s inside lawyer was Bob Balfe. Walmart’s chief counsel for global investigations, Balfe also had been a U.S. attorney, serving as the head of the Western District of Arkansas, which includes Walmart’s hometown of Bentonville. In the biggest case of his career, he’d successfully prosecuted a Walmart legend, then-vice chairman Tom Coughlin, for a bizarre embezzlement scheme. Since he’d come to Walmart, Balfe had helped steer the company through the seven-year bribery investigation.

Most of the interactions between the government and the Jones Day lawyers were politely choreographed. Hewitt and Balfe were the picture of affability. “When you meet with them, it’s like those two chipmunks,” said one person familiar with the investigation, referring to the Looney Tunes characters Mac and Tosh, gophers that speak with posh British accents. “‘After you.’ ‘No, after you.’ They are so polite.”

The two sides largely agreed on the facts, but differed completely on whether they justified a criminal charge. And a dispute over the use of a single word would poison relations between the two sides, with Walmart using the word as a cudgel to attack the prosecutors.

The word in question was “embarrass.” According to two people familiar with the prosecution, Rattan told the Walmart side that the company should feel embarrassed by its conduct. Walmart would portray it differently, claiming that Rattan said her goal was “to embarrass Walmart” with a criminal indictment. (Walmart’s account is captured in a letter of complaint Hewitt sent the next month to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.)

For the moment, though, the two sides maintained decorum. Walmart asked for 30 days to respond. Prosecutors agreed. On May 3 and 4, the two sides met again, this time in Plano, Texas, where the U.S. attorney’s offices are located.

By this time, Josh Russ had ramped up his office’s civil investigation. He did not plan to attend the May meeting, because it was a meeting led by the criminal side.

Walmart’s lawyers said they hoped to resolve any criminal or civil investigations in one shot and insisted on Russ’ presence. The prosecutors, leery of being accused of improperly coordinating the criminal and civil cases, demanded that Walmart make the request in writing. Walmart did, and Russ agreed to attend. Soon, however, Walmart would accuse the prosecutors of precisely the behavior they were attempting to avoid.

During the first six hours of the meeting, Hewitt and the Walmart lawyers described the results of their own internal investigation, saying the company’s outside lawyers had found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the company or its employees. They’d found no evidence of collusion or any improper financial relationships between doctors or customers and Walmart pharmacists. They also admitted that “Walmart could have and should have done more to voluntarily combat the opioid crisis,” according to the letter Hewitt sent to Rosenstein.

The Walmart lawyers outlined the risks to shareholders, employees and the public that could result from a criminal prosecution. But the prosecutors were unmoved. Rattan said that Walmart was no different from an individual criminal defendant who pleaded with the government for leniency by stating that her children would be harmed by her incarceration. Civil Chief Randi Russell took her remarks a step further, saying that Walmart’s size didn’t make it above prosecution. Balfe, becoming animated, touted Walmart’s opioid reforms and the company’s extensive cooperation with law enforcement.

“All of our defendants find Jesus in jail,” one person present recalled thinking. “But that doesn’t mean they don’t go to prison.”

The country was in a crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people dead and major companies poisoning people like drug dealers, as the prosecution team saw it. To the prosecutors, Walmart’s attitude was not only that it hadn’t done anything wrong, but that Walmart didn’t even need to take the prosecutors seriously. That point was reinforced the next day when Walmart made its first settlement offer: $34 million. Calling the offer “insulting,” Russ said Walmart could do better. The parties, he said, were “in different solar systems.”

The discussions reached a crescendo after one of Walmart’s outside lawyers accused the prosecutors of unethically trying to use the threat of a criminal prosecution to leverage higher civil penalties. Russell, angry, demanded that the Walmart lawyer retract his statement. Russ left the room, saying he would not tolerate an attack on his ethics.

The Eastern District thought Walmart should pay an amount that was several times larger than the then-record $150 million civil penalty that McKesson, the giant pharmaceutical distribution company, had paid for its alleged violations of the Controlled Substances Act. Russell suggested a payment of $1.2 billion.

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Pharmacists told ProPublica that they are seeing unusual and fraudulent prescribing activity as doctors stockpile unproven coronavirus drugs endorsed by President Donald Trump.

Later, Rattan pulled out her phone, announcing she’d received a “confidential text message” from her boss, U.S. Attorney Joe Brown, who was attending an NRA rally that day with President Donald Trump. According to Hewitt’s written account, Rattan read the text aloud to the slack-jawed Walmart lawyers: “Walk away, indict them, and then be willing to settle with them after the indictment.”

After another counteroffer, Rattan read Brown’s reply aloud: “That doesn’t hurt Walmart in the least.” Walmart, which had earlier boasted to the group of giving $1 billion a year away to charities, could do much better, the government prosecutors said. Civil Chief Russell quoted the New Testament: “To whom much is given, much is required.”

Some of the prosecutors were willing to trade off a large fine, however, if they could add greater detail to the statement of facts that would eventually go public. Russell said Walmart had to admit it had “killed people.” Jones Day appeared to be eager to avoid such an admission, which would have brought bad publicity and made the company vulnerable in private and state lawsuits. (Walmart is a defendant in the massive opioid lawsuit brought by the states.)

On the way home, Walmart’s lawyers processed what had just happened. Balfe told his colleagues it felt like a hostage situation. A week later, Hewitt wrote to Rosenstein, reiterating the complaint about the office’s purported ethical violations. In a subsequent letter to the DOJ, she appeared ready to make a civil deal: “Walmart is a responsible corporate citizen and stands ready to engage in a principled and reasoned dialogue concerning any potential conduct of its employees that merits a civil penalty under the CSA.”

Rattan and her fellow criminal prosecutors insisted they were sincere. “The threat of indictment is real,” she said, as she concluded the May meeting. “I am not bluffing.” Rattan had amassed a highly successful record in her dozens of trials. “I’m telling you right now,” she would say around the office of the case against Walmart. “Swear in 12 people and present the evidence and they are in trouble.”

Josh Russ began preparing to file the Eastern District’s civil complaint. He sent it to the DEA, which signed off on it. In August 2018, the U.S. attorney’s office commenced planning to bring its civil charges; it began preparations for a press conference to make the announcement.

Meanwhile, Walmart continued appealing up the chain to top officials in Washington. On Aug. 10, Jones Day’s Hewitt sent a letter to Benczkowski, assistant attorney general and head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, complaining about the investigation. The letter argued that a conviction could harm “millions of low-income and elderly citizens” who rely on federal programs for food and medicine. A convicted corporation might not be permitted to participate in those programs any longer. She outlined what she said were Walmart’s “remedial” measures to become “an industry leader in the Nation’s fight against the opioid crisis.”

© Provided by ProPublica

“It first struck me how different it was when I saw my first coronavirus patient go bad. I was like, Holy s**t, this is not the flu. Watching this relatively young guy, gasping for air, pink frothy secretions coming out of his tube.”

Soon after, an official in the deputy attorney general’s office called Brown and told him to halt the Texas office’s criminal investigation, according to five people familiar with the investigation.

Officials at DOJ in Washington then turned their attention to the civil probe. In a video conference call in late August, Stephen Cox, the deputy associate attorney general and a top official in the civil division, and Mary Daly, a daughter of Bill Barr and then the director of opioid enforcement, asked Russ’ team about its tactics and evidence. Cox, who had never been a federal prosecutor and joined the agency from Texas energy company Apache, appeared upset that the Texas prosecutors had sought emails between compliance officials and their bosses, senior executives at Walmart. He seemed to view that tactic as overly aggressive, according to a person familiar with the investigation. The Texas prosecutors said they did so to find out what top Walmart executives knew.

Russ and others contended the civil suit was ready to be filed. Cox said it wasn’t. To spur Cox and his colleagues to action, Russ began to send daily examples of what the prosecutorial team viewed as particularly egregious prescriptions Walmart pharmacists had filled. His message: People had died because of opioids Walmart had dispensed, and every day that passed meant another lost opportunity because of the ticking clock on the statute of limitations.

Meanwhile, Walmart exercised its PR and political muscle. Just days after the contentious May meeting with Eastern District officials, Walmart launched what it billed as a sweeping effort “aimed at curbing opioid misuse and abuse.” The cornerstone was that it would restrict initial opioid prescriptions to no more than a seven-day supply. In September 2018, Ivanka Trump visited a Walmart in Mesquite, Texas, very close to the Eastern District’s offices. She was there, the White House said, to learn how Walmart trains and retains workers. The trip seemed to indicate just how close the company was to the White House.

© Provided by ProPublicaIvanka Trump attends a White House signing ceremony in January 2018 to provide Customs and Border Protection agents with screening technology to fight the opioid crisis. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

Then came the meeting with Rosenstein in October 2018. Asked about his comments that day, Rosenstein responded by email that he did not recall his comment about everyone being “capitalists” but said: “If you lack the courage to decline a proposed criminal prosecution when you conclude that it is a mistake, you do not belong in a leadership job. We reached every decision after considering the non-partisan factors set forth in the Justice Department’s principles of federal prosecution.”

Trump officials ordered a six-month cooling off period, directing the U.S. attorney’s office to try to reach a settlement with Walmart.

Meanwhile the DOJ formed a national Walmart Working Group, with four other U.S. attorney’s offices in New York, North Carolina, Florida and Colorado. State attorneys general were brought in. On the one hand, the creation of the group underscored the national character of Walmart’s opioid problems. On the other, it dispersed responsibility among different offices and Russ, who was appointed co-head of the group, told colleagues he thought his investigation was being taken away from him.

In January 2019, the DEA presented Walmart with a new, broad subpoena. Walmart had been furnishing what it contended were huge volumes of materials. But it had not handed over everything the government requested. Walmart complained to the prosecutors that the requests were too onerous and overreaching, and that the company needed more time.

Prosecutors felt Walmart wasn’t sufficiently cooperative. Walmart never furnished a full list of doctors its pharmacists were concerned about. Walmart did not give the government full information on its internal databases to analyze prescribing information and patterns. Perhaps most crucially, Walmart had not turned over the emails the Eastern District had subpoenaed between compliance officials and their bosses (the ones Cox had been so shocked about).

Russ begged Washington officials to take it to a judge to enforce the government’s subpoena. The Trump appointees refused, telling the Working Group to keep negotiating.

The Texas prosecutors worried Walmart had an even better inside track than it had already displayed. In June 2019, they learned that Hewitt and Balfe had met with Barr.

The company says the three met as part of a national conference of U.S. attorneys and that it amounted to a grip-and-grin photo op in the presence of several other U.S. attorneys. No one raised the investigation, according to Walmart: “Bob Balfe and Karen Hewitt did not have any discussions with Attorney General Barr or his staff about Walmart.”

In response to an extensive list of questions for this story, DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec responded with a statement that read in whole: “While the Department does not generally confirm, deny, or acknowledge the existence of investigations, it is worth noting that Pro Publica’s reporting in this piece is misleading and contains numerous inaccuracies and erroneous conclusions. As just one example, the meeting with Attorney General Barr that is cited was with eight former US Attorneys from the National Association of Former US Attorneys (NAFUSA) all acting in their capacities as NAFUSA officers, where no particular matters were discussed.”

Still, the prosecutors felt like the Walmart side attempted multiple end runs. For example, Cox’s predecessor, Rachel Brand, had left the DOJ in February 2018 to take a top job in Walmart’s legal department. About a year later, Brand’s attorney inquired as to whether she could appear before the DOJ. The Eastern District team got wind of the request and raised concerns. Walmart says Brand had no interactions with top DOJ or White House officials about the investigation.

© Provided by ProPublica

On the criminal side, now that the corporate indictment was dead, the Texas prosecutors pursued the directive to focus on individuals. Rattan prepared an indictment of Brad Nelson, the former compliance manager who had told an executive that the company should focus on “driving sales.”

Walmart lawyers objected. Nelson was no criminal, they contended. Jones Day kept up its pressure. In another letter to Trump officials on Sept. 27, 2019, this time addressed to Gus Eyler, who was now the co-head of the national Walmart Working Group with Russ, Hewitt objected to the threat of a Nelson indictment and once again accused the prosecutors of trying to embarrass the company. Hewitt wrote: “We are concerned that either of the following may be true: the threat of an indictment of Mr. Nelson is being made to pressure Walmart in a civil proceeding in violation of DOJ procedures and the rules of legal ethics, or, just as concerning, EDTX actually intends to prosecute an individual not because the facts support it but in an effort to embarrass Walmart in retaliation for the previous declination of a criminal case against the Company.”

She added, “We also intend to suspend further production of documents under the Omnibus Subpoena until these issues relating to the status of this investigation are resolved.”

The government had issued a lawful subpoena. Walmart was treating it as optional.

Under other circumstances, the DOJ might have raced into a court to force a defiant company to comply with the subpoena. Instead, soon after receiving Hewitt’s letter, Washington informed the Texas prosecutors that they could not indict Nelson.

The civil investigation was still muddling on, however. In midsummer, as the six-month deadline approached, Russ told DOJ officials that Walmart was still not cooperating fully. Trump officials decided to give Walmart three more months. When the next deadline came up on Oct. 25, Washington wanted to extend the negotiations again.

Russ resigned that day. Walmart, he said in his resignation letter, “abused the Department’s fairness, largely ignored our subpoena, and scoffed at our larger work on behalf of all Americans.”

He added, “When I took my oath of office, I invoked God’s judgment and swore that I would support and defend the Constitution.”

The news reverberated throughout the office. “Josh was Captain America, well-respected, well thought of. It came as a big blow,” said a person familiar with the investigation, adding, “It seemed that maybe the country’s best interests were not at heart.”

On Nov. 7, the new deputy attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, summoned the Texas prosecutorial team again to Washington for another meeting, gauging the progress of the Working Group’s negotiations with Walmart. The team reprised its presentation of the evidence that it had delivered to Rosenstein about a year earlier. Joe Brown, the U.S. attorney, asked Rosen: “Can you point out what’s wrong with our evidence?” Rosen did not respond.

In recent weeks, the DOJ’s inaction has begun to raise concerns on Capitol Hill. Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Dhillon and Barr expressing “concern regarding the Department’s inability to hold prescription opioid distributors and chain pharmacies accountable.” A hearing may follow.

Meanwhile, four years after the investigation first began, negotiations on a civil settlement between the government and Walmart continue.

Do you have information about the Trump Department of Justice or corporate malfeasance? Jesse Eisinger can be reached at jesse.eisinger@propublica.org or on Signal: 718-496-5233.

Doris Burke contributed reporting.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange denied bail by London court

LONDON, March 25 (Reuters) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is fighting extradition from Britain to the United States, was denied bail on Wednesday after his lawyers said he should be released because he was at high risk of contracting the coronavirus in prison.

© Reuters/SIMON DAWSON WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange leaves Westminster Magistrates Court in London

The 48-year-old is wanted by the United States on 18 criminal counts of conspiring to hack government computers and violating an espionage law and says he could spend decades in prison if convicted.

“As matters stand today, this global pandemic does not as of itself provide grounds for Mr Assange’s release," said Judge Vanessa Baraitser at Westminster Magistrates' Court.

She said Assange's past conduct showed how far he was prepared to go to avoid extradition proceedings, and there were substantial grounds to believe that if released he would abscond again.

She was referring to the fact that Assange skipped bail and fled to the Ecuadorean embassy in London in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted at the time to answer questions on alleged sex crimes. The allegations have since been dropped.

Assange remained holed up in the embassy for seven years. He was eventually dragged out after Ecuador revoked his asylum.

He is being held at Belmarsh Prison in London.

UK doctors are threatening to quit because they have not been given enough safety equipment to protect them from the coronavirus

Thomas Colson 3/25/2020

Getty Images/Christopher Furlong


Doctors in the UK could quit the NHS if they are not given better equipment to protect themselves from the coronavirus, according to a group representing them.
'Some doctors may feel they have no choice but to give up the profession they love, because they feel so abandoned by not being given the PPE that the World Health Organization recommends,' Dr Rinesh Parmar, chair of the Doctors' Association UK, told the Guardian.

The move threatens to undermine an NHS recruitment drive which the government launched last week.

There have been 8,077 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the UK and 422 deaths.


LONDON — Doctors leading the fight against the coronavirus in the UK have threatened to quit if the UK government fails to provide them with adequate protective equipment soon.

As the outbreak continues to grow in the UK, with 8,077 confirmed cases and 422 deaths, doctors say they are being forced to endanger their own health due to a nationwide shortage of the right equipment.

Personal protective equipment (PPE) includes masks, respirators, and gowns, and can help prevent transmission of the virus between medical staff and patients.

Dr Rinesh Parmar, chair of the Doctors' Association UK, told the Guardian: "The longer this epidemic goes on for, if doctors feel that there is a widespread lack of personal protective equipment, then some doctors may feel they have no choice but to give up the profession they love, because they feel so abandoned by not being given the PPE that the World Health Organization recommends.

"That's the travesty of this situation, that the government needs to protect frontline health workers and in return they will give 100%. But the government hasn't kept its side of the bargain with NHS staff by not having enough PPE available to safeguard the health of doctors and nurses."

Organisations representing nurses, paramedics, GPs, and midwives have also echoed concerns about the lack of protective equipment in recent weeks.

The move threatens to undermine a recruitment drive which the government launched last week.

Matt Hancock, the government, said on Tuesday that nearly 12,000 retired NHS workers had already agreed to return to hospitals and support efforts to tackle the coronavirus.

The Doctors Association, a lobby group, warned last week that NHS staff felt like "lambs to the slaughter" and said that a lack of safety equipment was endangering the lives of patients as well.

Matt Hancock admitted on Tuesday that there had been "challenges" with the supply of PPE to medical staff in England. He said the government purchased a million face masks over the weekend and was taking the issue "very seriously."

"I am determined to ensure that the right kit gets to the right hospital, the right ambulance service, the right doctors' surgery, right across the country," he said.

"There have been challenges and I can see that. We're on it and trying to solve all the problems."

The shortage of safety equipment came under further scrutiny on Wednesday, when a large-scale PPE manufacturer said it had emailed NHS trusts twice since January offering further supplies.

Pam Parker, managing director of PPS in Milton Keynes, told BBC's Today programme that representatives for the NHS "said they had it all under control and they didn't need them."

"We did offer [equipment to] local authorities and that was just a few weeks ago. They said, no thank you, we've got enough."


She said the equipment was subsequently sent to Spain, Germany, and Chile.

Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said last week there was already an adequate supply of equipment but there were logistical problems in distributing it quickly enough.

"We have obviously been talking to national NHS leaders and what they say to us is there are sufficient national stocks of personal protection equipment but there is currently a problem in terms of the logistical distribution of them," he told iNews.

"What's happened is that, because of the sudden and understandable spike in demand, it is taking a bit of time for the logistical distribution to catch up, but the bit that they are saying to us is there are sufficient national stocks; the issue is actually ensuring that those stocks reach the front line in the right numbers, in the right places, at the right time."

CHUCK HOLDS BALL FOR LUCY 
Chuck Schumer made sure businesses controlled by Trump, his family, and top US officials couldn't get money from the government's $2 trillion coronavirus bailout fund

Tom Porter 3/25/2020

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and President Donald Trump speak in the White House State Dining Room on January 23, 2017. Getty Images/Pool

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer secured a condition in the government's $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package that barred President Donald Trump's businesses from receiving money.

Under the proviso, businesses owned by members of Congress, Vice President Mike Pence, and top members of the executive branch are also excluded from the bailout.
Trump owns a string of high-end hotels and golf resorts — and several of his businesses have been shuttered during the pandemic. 

The aid package, agreed on by the White House and Senate early Wednesday morning, provides assistance to Americans laid off in the crisis and businesses struggling amid a sharp economic downturn. 

Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer secured an agreement in the $2 trillion federal coronavirus stimulus package that barred businesses owned by President Donald Trump, his family, top US officials, and members of Congress from receiving any money from the fund.

A spokesman for Schumer's office told Reuters that under the proviso, businesses owned by Vice President Mike Pence and heads of the executive branch would also be barred from receiving Treasury department loans and investments in the aid program.

The Senate and White House agreed on a massive $2 trillion stimulus package to help American workers and businesses mitigate the devastating economic impact of the coronavirus. They reached the agreement early Wednesay morning.

Under the deal, direct payment and an unemployment benefits will be sent to millions of Americans whose livelihood are imperiled by the pandemic, and states and businesses will receive aid to help them offset the economic impact of the crisis.

From left to right: Vice President Mike Pence, Trump, and Schumer in the Oval Office. Evan Vucci/AP Images

Before the agreement was reached, there was speculation about how an aid package would affect businesses owned by Trump, a real-estate developer who owns a string of high-end hotels and golf courses across the US — several of which have been shuttered as part of measures to contain the outbreak.


The businesses closed include six of Trump's seven most profitable businesses, including resorts and hotels in south Florida, New Jersey, and Las Vegas, The Washington Post reported.

According to Trump's most recent financial statements, in 2018, the businesses account for $174 million a year of Trump's annual revenue.

In recent days, Trump has advocated easing strict quarantining measures introduced to stop the outbreak in order to ease the impact on the economy. Many critics have said that easing the measures could imperil public health.

A sparsely populated outdoor space in New York City on March 4, 2020. Getty Images

One of the major sticking points of the $2 trillion aid bill had been the provision of oversights to ensure the business fund was distributed fairly, and that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin did not allow Trump and his allies to profit.

Trump no longer has a direct role in the day-to-day operation of his businesses, and has handed over control to his two sons, Eric and Donald Jr.

Under Schumer's proviso, businesses owned by the children or spouses of top officials and lawmakers are also barred from the aid package, CNN's Manu Raju tweeted.

But earlier in the week neither Trump not his company, the Trump Organization, had ruled out applying to for congressional bailout funds if they became available.

"Everything's changing, just so you understand, it's all changing," Trump said on Sunday. "But I have no idea."

Jeff Bezos, Larry Fink, and other top US execs dodged $1.9 billion in losses by selling their own stock as the coronavirus outbreak worsened


Ben Winck Mar. 24, 2020

Top executives sold a total of $9.2 billion in their firms' stock before markets hit fresh lows on March 20, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

The sales made between February 1 and March 19 led corporate leaders to avoid potential losses totaling $1.9 billion, according to The Journal's analysis. Markets tanked through late February and March as coronavirus risks weighed on investors' nerves.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos accounted for roughly one-third of executives' 2020 sales. The chief executive offloaded $3.4 billion in the e-commerce giant's stock in the first week of February, leading him to dodge losses of about $317 million.

Financial sector giants including BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Apollo Global Management Director Marc Rowan, and Intercontinental Exchange Chief Executive Jeffrey Sprecher also dumped shares amid the market turmoil.

more stories.

US executives spanning several sectors cashed out a total of $9.2 billion in company stock before markets bottomed on coronavirus fears, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Corporate leaders avoided losses totaling $1.9 billion through sales between February 1 and March 19, according to The Journal's analysis. Much of the selling took place through pre-established trading schedules, which help executives skirt allegations of insider trading.

While executives often sell stock at the beginning of the year, sale volume was about 33% greater in recent weeks compared to comparable periods over the last two years, The Journal reported.

US stocks tanked over the six-week period as the coronavirus pandemic intensified and an oil-market struggle between Saudi Arabia and Russia fueled additional volatility. Equities slid into their first bear market in 11 years, and by March 20, the S&P 500 sat roughly 30% from its February 19 peak.

The largest seller was Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, according to The Journal, who offloaded $3.4 billion in company shares during the first week of February. The sale led Bezos to avoid losses of about $317 million had he held the stock until March 20. The sold position accounted for more than a third of executive sales this year, according to The Journal.

Read more: 'If you're going to dip a toe, start here': Citi says these 17 cash-rich stocks are perfect for traders seeking cheap opportunities in a coronavirus-hit market

Financial sector giants accounted for some of the biggest sales over the period. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink cashed out $25 million worth of shares on February 14, avoiding more than $9.3 million in potential losses. Fink offloaded $18 million worth of BlackRock shares around the same time last year, a spokesperson told The Journal.

Marc Rowan, co-founder and director of private equity firm Apollo Global Management, sold $99 million in company shares between February and early March, The Journal reported, escaping potential losses of about $40 million.





Jeffrey Sprecher, CEO of New York Stock Exchange-parent Intercontinental Exchange, traded in $18 million in stock to avoid a $3 million loss.

Moody's CEO Raymond McDaniel offloaded $10 million worth of shares, roughly triple his monthly sale average in 2019, according to The Journal's analysis. The sales saved about $2.7 million in potential losses.

Lance Uggla, CEO of data provider IHS Markit, dumped $47 million of shares in the firm around February 19, dodging a $19.2 million loss had he held the shares into late March, The Journal reported.

Read more: 'Historically attractive': BlackRock's bond chief who oversees $2.3 trillion told us 5 places to buy the dip as the coronavirus crisis ravages markets

Even executives leading industries hit hardest by the virus' economic fallout sold shares before suffering greater financial hits. MGM Resorts CEO James Murren sold $22.2 million of the company's stock between February 19 and February 20, just one week after he announced he will leave the hotel chain. The trades helped Murren shake a $15.9 million loss, The Journal reported.

The coronavirus outbreak swiftly tore into travel and tourism industries through February and into March, leaving exposed industries concerned about a sudden demand shock.

The Journal combed over more than 4,000 regulatory filings from February 1 to March 19 for its executive sale analysis. Calculations for avoided losses are based on the change in stock price from the time of the sale to its level on March 20.

Why companies like Goldman Sachs, Apple, and Facebook had all of those N95 masks to donate in the first place

Various N95 respiration masks at a laboratory of 3M, that has been contracted by the U.S. government to produce extra marks in response to the country's novel coronavirus outbreak, in Maplewood, Minnesota, U.S. March 4, 2020. Reuters/Nicholas Pfosi

Companies like Facebook, Apple, and Goldman Sachs are donating their stockpiles of face masks including N95 respirators to healthcare workers. 

The companies have these masks in preparation for wildfires or from past epidemics like the avian flu or swine flu. 

There has been a shortage of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers all across the US. 

Large institutions like Facebook, Apple, and Goldman Sachs have donated masks to healthcare workers amid shortages during the coronavirus outbreak, several news agencies reported.

Facebook donated 72,000 masks out of its emergency reserve, Reuters reported; Apple donated 9 million masks, Vice President Mike Pence said on Tuesday; and last week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that Goldman Sachs donated 100,000 masks to his state, CNN reported.

Leslie Shribman, a spokesperson for Goldman Sachs told Business Insider in an email that the company is donating 100,000 N95 masks to both New York and New Jersey. Additionally, the company will also donate 50,000 N95s to the NHS in the United Kingdom.

Shribman also said they were also working with hospitals in states like California and Utah to send masks "based on where the needs are most acute."

N95 masks are an important protective equipment component used by healthcare workers dealing with the coronavirus. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, those masks are able to filter out at least 95% of particles in the air.

These organizations had these mask supplies as a means to protect employees from other threats, such as wildfires.

"To help, Facebook donated our emergency reserve of 720,000 masks that we had bought in case the wildfires continued," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post.

Additionally, Regina Phelps, president of Emergency Management and Safety Solutions told The Wall Street Journal that some financial institutions began gathering face masks 15 years ago in light of the avian-flu outbreak in China. It was believed that face masks could protect people from being infected with a respiratory illness. Companies continued to stockpile those materials in 2009, in light of the swine flu pandemic.

A spokesperson for Goldman Sachs told the WSJ that the company's mask supply "were procured in the wake of previous epidemics."

"At this moment in time, Apple went to their storehouses and is donating 9 million N95 masks to healthcare facilities all across the country and to the national stockpile," Pence said.


Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, also said he'll be donating 250,000 N95 masks in an email to CleanTechnica.

Other organizations like Nasdaq Inc. and Mastercard have also pledged to donate masks, The Journal reported.

Healthcare workers and experts all across the country have said there's a shortage of personal protective equipment needed to help doctors and nurses tackle the coronavirus outbreak, Business Insider previously reported.

The US has more than 54,000 COVID-19 cases with at least 700 deaths.

Facebook and Apple did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Apple is donating 9 million protective face masks to help fight the coronavirus pandemic

Apple is donating 9 million protective face masks to COVID-19 relief efforts in the US, the Vice President Mike Pence said in a press briefing on Tuesday.

The vice president said he and President Trump recently spoke with Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Cook is one of several tech CEOs that has pledged to donate face masks, along with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.


Apple is donating 9 million protective face masks to help combat the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Vice President Mike Pence said during a press briefing on Tuesday.

"And I spoke today, and the president spoke last week, with Tim Cook of Apple," Pence said. "And at this moment in time Apple went to their store houses and is donating 9 million N95 masks to healthcare facilities all across the country and to the national stockpile. "

Cook recently said on Twitter that Apple would be donating "millions" of masks to workers in the US and Europe, while Pence also previously said the company would be providing 2 million masks.

"Our teams at Apple have been working to help source supplies for healthcare providers fighting COVID-19," Cook wrote on Twitter on Saturday. "We're donating millions of masks for health professionals in the US and Europe. To every one of the heroes on the front lines, we thank you."

Apple is one of several technology giants donating masks as the US grapples with supply shortages as the coronavirus spreads.

Doctors in at least two hospitals in New York City, which has been a hotspot for COVID-19 infections, have been told to reuse their masks to preserve their supply, Business Insider's Jacob Shamsian reported earlier in March. In Los Angeles, some doctors are turning to seamstresses in the city's garment district for new masks.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also recently said the company will be donating the 720,000 masks it had purchased as a protective measure against the California wildfires and plans to source millions more.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also recently said in an email to CleanTechnica that he'll be donating at least 250,000 N95 masks.

N95 respirators are different than surgical face masks in that they're able to form a tight enough seal to filter out at least 95% of particles in the air, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Surgical masks, comparatively, are loose-fitting and protects the wearer from large droplets and splashes.