Foreign Owned Corporations

Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo's mayoral campaign on Wednesday said it would return $2,780 in apparently improper contributions Woo has received from foreign-owned corporations. Federal law prohibits foreign firms from contributing to any U.S. election campaign. Woo's campaign launched a review of several legally questionable contributions following inquiries from The Times and other media.

For several years, carmakers have been reaping the benefits of explosive growth in emerging global markets, even as U.S. sales have tanked. That may be changing. On Thursday, Toyota Motor Corp. said it was cutting its worldwide sales forecast for 2009 by 7%, to 9.7 million cars and light trucks. And although a bleak U.S. sales picture is mainly to blame, 300,000 of the revision comes from international markets, including a 150,000 cut in Asia, which has been among the world's fastest-growing regions in recent years.

Do we Americans really dislike the Japanese? What cause do we have for malice? Who among us has been truly threatened, wronged or otherwise hurt as a consequence of Japan's formidable economic power? These questions have been haunting the rarefied debate over U.S.-Japan relations for years, and now a congressional panel is offering a new high-resolution focus for the quandary: racial bias in the workplace.

Zimbabwe will transfer ownership of all foreign-owned firms that support Western sanctions against President Robert Mugabe's government to citizens and investors from "friendly" countries, a state newspaper reported. The southern African state is struggling with an economic crisis many blame on Mugabe's policies, which has left it with an inflation rate higher than 2 million percent and chronic shortages of food and other basic needs. The government blames the crisis on sabotage by enemies upset by seizures of white-owned farms for blacks, and has followed up that policy with another controversial law seeking to transfer majority ownership of foreign firms to Zimbabweans.

Joe Robertson has come a long way since hawking bedspreads at Orange County flea markets in the 1970s. He now owns and operates a new $35-million textile plant that soon will be the largest of its kind in Baja California. His company, Huntington Beach-based Kojo Industries, is one of the hundreds of U.S.

Cummins Engine Co. announced Wednesday the second of what Mexican authorities expect will be a flood of export-oriented auto parts plant expansions and openings that will bring $5 billion or more in investment to the country over the next few years. The Columbus, Ind.-based diesel engine manufacturer with $3.

Mexican media giant Grupo Televisa's purchase of a minority interest in the largest U.S. Spanish-language television network has focused attention on an aspect of the talks concerning a North American free trade agreement that until now largely had been overlooked: TV station ownership. Since the possibility of a trade agreement was first discussed, Televisa Chairman Emilio Azcarraga has been pressuring for changes in the U.S.

High turnover among Americans working for Japanese-owned companies in the Southland and growing demands by those employees for a bigger voice in management is increasingly prompting Japanese employers to adopt U.S. management practices, according to a recent study. Japanese companies "are swinging to the other side of the pendulum by Americanizing their management style," said Dennis Laurie, a former Arco Corp.

The floor at the National Assn. of Television Program Executives' convention here this week was filled with the usual participants pitching new talk shows, game shows and reruns to local TV stations. There are 1,100 commercial TV stations in the United States, and executives from most of them have come to New Orleans searching for next year's big hit.

Among the hundreds of dinners, coffees and receptions that benefited the Democratic Party last year, a single private gathering featuring President Clinton and four wealthy Asian businessmen at a luxury hotel here last July is emerging as a focus of particular intrigue. The fund-raiser was extraordinary in several respects. One was its intimacy: The president rarely attends a campaign event with such a small group.

Cuba said Friday that it would allow foreign companies to pay Cuban employees with hard currency, a move that legalizes widespread under-the- table payments but also requires workers to declare and pay tax on that income. Representatives of 698 foreign companies registered with Cuba's Chamber of Commerce were told by Finance Ministry officials this week that as of Jan. 1, they must record all hard currency payments to employees.

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday eliminated a rule requiring foreign companies with U.S.-traded shares to explain their financial results in line with U.S. accounting standards. The move, a push toward acceptance of a single, global accounting standard, has raised objections from investor advocates and some key lawmakers.

The Chinese government Thursday passed legislation that prohibits some monopolies but also could throw new hurdles in front of foreign companies seeking to acquire businesses here. The final text of the long-anticipated law, the drafting of which began in 1994, was not immediately released. But recent versions have included practices common in U.S. and European antitrust regimes, such as bans on companies colluding to raise prices and abusing dominant market positions.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, which plans to drop a requirement that foreign companies reconcile their financial statements with U.S. accounting standards, found discrepancies in how businesses follow international rules. Overseas companies in the same industry sometimes present figures on profit and revenue differently, the agency said in a staff report released Tuesday. The regulator said it also found instances in which disclosures were "missing, unclear or generic."

Venezuela stripped the world's biggest oil companies of operational control over massive Orinoco Belt crude projects Tuesday, sending in workers backed by troops to occupy the multibillion-dollar installations. Rallying thousands of workers dressed in the signature red of his self-styled revolution, President Hugo Chavez hailed what he called the end of U.S.-prescribed policies that had opened up the largest oil reserves in the hemisphere to foreign investment.

Four major oil companies Wednesday agreed to cede control of Venezuela's last remaining privately run oil projects to President Hugo Chavez's government, but ConocoPhillips resisted, prompting warnings that its fields could be taken over outright. Markets have waited to see whether the companies, which process heavy oil in the Orinoco River basin, would remain as minority partners after Chavez decreed last month that their fields be nationalized May 1.

It was a signal occasion, a milestone in the struggle of Asian immigrants to find their place in the American firmament. With the acuity of hindsight, it's clear the elements of the eventual scandal were there too, wanting only more time to reach critical mass and explode.

The Chinese government Thursday passed legislation that prohibits some monopolies but also could throw new hurdles in front of foreign companies seeking to acquire businesses here. The final text of the long-anticipated law, the drafting of which began in 1994, was not immediately released. But recent versions have included practices common in U.S. and European antitrust regimes, such as bans on companies colluding to raise prices and abusing dominant market positions.

Venezuela threatened Tuesday not to compensate some foreign oil companies in its planned takeover of their multibillion-dollar projects in the OPEC nation's vast Orinoco reserve. The warning from the oil minister has intensified the pressure the leftist government of President Hugo Chavez has exerted on some of the world's largest companies as they negotiate before a June deadline over the nationalizations. "We are all talking.

China approved four foreign banks to begin local currency services to individual Chinese customers, opening access to the country's $4 trillion in household savings and surging demand for credit cards and other financial services. The four banks approved are the locally incorporated entities of Citigroup Inc., HSBC Holdings' Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corp., Standard Chartered and Bank of East Asia, the China Banking Regulatory Commission said.