Visa is expected to announce that Joseph Saunders will become CEO of the company as it prepares to go public next year. Saunders, Visa's executive chairman, helped restructure the company by finding board members and naming a new CEO. Visa said last year that it would go public to fund its expansion and help pay legal costs.
Tyco International agreed to pay $2.98 billion to settle nearly all pending class-action lawsuits related to the company's accounting fraud under previous management. Shareholders who owned publicly traded securities of Tyco between December 1999 and June 2002 filed the original lawsuit. In December, the SEC charged two more former executives in connection with frauds that inflated Tyco's operating income by hundreds of millions of dollars.
BMW, the world's largest premium carmaker, said today that it would build the next-generation X3 mid-size SUV in its U.S. plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The company said it would increase production in its South Carolina plant from 140,000 vehicles per year to over 200,000.
Merrill Lynch is starting a new Asian team to focus on providing investment advice and investment banking services to the region's growing number of wealthy business owners. The company will service clients that they call ultra high net worth individuals who are worth more than $30 million. Merrill is attempting to serve both the companies of business owners and the businesspeople themselves.