SAC Capital reached an agreement with federal prosecutors to settle criminal charges of insider trading. The hedge fund pleaded guilty to all counts against it in the indictment, including to securities fraud, and was fined $1.8 billion (an earlier $616m levied by the Securities and Exchange Commission is included in the fine). It amounts to the biggest penalty to date for insider trading. SAC will also close its business to outside investors and operate solely on behalf of its founder, Steven Cohen, who is in talks regarding a separate lawsuit against him personally. See article Shining a light The Tax Justice Network, a pressure group, published its latest index of financial secrecy. This is based on 15 indicators, including the transparency of company ownership, weighted by the size of a country's offshore financial sector. Switzerland topped the list again; the TJN described recent Swiss concessions as "limited." Britain was 21st, though it would have been first if it and the jurisdictions it partly controls, such as Jersey and the Cayman Islands, had been lumped together. The investigation into the latest scandal to emerge in the financial industry gathered pace, as Barclays reportedly suspended six traders as part of its internal inquiry into alleged rigging of the foreign-exchange market. Other banks, including Citigroup and UBS, are also working with authorities looking at chicanery in currency trading. One probe is studying online transcripts from traders who called themselves "The Cartel." Royal Bank of Scotland, which is still majority-owned by the British government five years after a bail-out, decided to put £38 billion ($61 billion) of its riskiest assets into a "bad bank" that it will manage internally, rather than split itself in two, which had been mooted. The toxic assets thus remain on RBS's balance-sheet and it will book an impairment charge of around £4.5 billion this year. Our mutual friends Britain's Co-operative Bank, a self-styled ethical bank that traces its roots to 1872, agreed to a rescue plan from a group of hedge funds that will end up with a 70% stake in the business. The Co-op is creating a committee to make sure its new owners let it adhere to its investing principles. An independent report into the suicide of the chief financial officer at Zurich Insurance, which stunned markets in August, found no evidence that the firm's management had put him under "undue pressure." Josef Ackermann, one of Europe's most experienced bankers, resigned as chairman over the incident. The European Union slightly reduced its forecast for economic growth in the euro zone next year to 1.1%. It also said it expects inflation to "remain subdued." The inflation rate in the currency bloc fell to just 0.7% in October, putting it on a par with Japan and raising fears about the prospect of deflation in Europe. Tesla, the poster-child for the electric-car industry, reported a big jump in revenue for the third quarter and a much smaller net loss, of $38m, compared with the same period last year. It also increased slightly its forecast for the number of Model S cars it expects to deliver this year, to 21,500. But its outlook and actual sales in the quarter were weaker than expected, stalling the mercurial rise in the carmaker's share price, which had shot up by more than 400% this year. Vivendi, a French media conglomerate, agreed to sell its 53% stake in Maroc Telecom to Etisalat, a telecoms operator that has its headquarters in Abu Dhabi, in a deal valued at $5.7 billion. Vivendi, which is selling assets outside its core business of entertainment, will use some of the money from the sale to repay its debts. BAE Systems, Britain's biggest defence company, said it was cutting 1,775 jobs at its shipyards and shutting most of its operations at Portsmouth, the historic home of shipbuilding for the Royal Navy (some repair work will remain there). BAE is concentrating the work for new naval vessels at two shipyards in Scotland. Analysts wondered how much more pain BlackBerry could endure, after it abandoned a plan to be taken private by its largest investor, Fairfax Financial, and booted out Thorsten Heins as chief executive. He had been in the job for only 22 months. The smartphone-maker instead announced a $1 billion investment and appointed John Chen, a stalwart of the technology industry, as interim chief executive. Its share price swooned. Bird droppings Twitter set the price of its IPO to $26 a share as it prepared to make its stockmarket debut on November 7th, well above its initial price range and even higher than a revised price it had indicated just a few days earlier. The microblogging site has yet to make a profit.