NBCUniversal invests in digital Vox Media
NEW YORK – NBCUniversal is investing $200 million in digital media company Vox Media, whose brands include news site Vox, food blog Eater, the sports-focused SB Nation and the tech blog Re/code.
NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast Corp., said Wednesday it hopes to build a partnership with Vox that involves collaborating on editorial content, advertising and technology. A representative declined to comment beyond the announcement.
A person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly confirmed that the investment values privately held Vox at $1 billion. The investment comes amid the growing popularity of digital media brands, especially among younger people.
Bank returning millions for shorting customers
WASHINGTON – Citizens Bank is returning $14 million to individual and business customers in an agreement with federal regulators for failing to credit customers the full amounts of their deposits.
The bank also was fined a total of $20.5 million by three federal agencies. Altogether, customers with hundreds of thousands of checking and savings accounts were shorted millions of dollars over six years starting in 2008, the regulators said Wednesday. The action, the first of its kind, was brought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
Citizens Bank pocketed the difference in cases where the totals marked on deposit slips didn’t match the actual money deposited, or when the bank’s scanners misread deposit slips or checks, the regulators said.
Citizens Financial Group Inc., among the 20 largest U.S. banks with about $137 billion in assets and $100 billion in deposits, is based in Providence, Rhode Island.
Bumble Bee will pay $6M for worker’s death
LOS ANGELES – Jose Melena was loading tons of tuna into industrial ovens at Bumble Bee Foods when any worker’s worst nightmare occurred – he got trapped inside and the massive pressure cooker was turned on.
Melena’s grisly death in a 270-degree oven three years ago led to a $6 million agreement by Bumble Bee on Wednesday to settle criminal charges in what Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey said was the largest payout in a California workplace-violation death. The sum was four times greater than the maximum fines the company faced.
“This is the worst circumstances of death I have ever, ever witnessed,” Deputy District Attorney Hoon Chun said. Melena, 62, perished at the seafood company’s Santa Fe Springs plant after a co-worker mistakenly believed he was in the bathroom and loaded six tons of canned tuna into the oven after he had stepped inside.
The company didn’t have safety procedures that would have required the equipment be turned off with an employee inside or provide an escape route or a spotter to keep watch with a worker in a confined space, Hoon said.