Finance news. My opinion.

Scott Thompson’s reign as Yahoo’s CEO is in jeopardy after just four months on the job because he allowed an inaccuracy about his academic credentials to recur for years.

A major Yahoo shareholder who exposed the fabrication is now leading the charge to oust Thompson for unethical conduct. In a letter Friday, activist hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb demanded that the board of the struggling Internet company fire Thompson by noon EDT Monday or face possible legal action.

“CEO’s have been terminated for less at other companies,” wrote Loeb, who controls a 5.8 percent stake in Yahoo through his hedge fund, Third Point.

Yahoo reiterated Friday that “the board is reviewing this matter and, upon completion of its review, will make an appropriate disclosure to shareholders.”

Thompson’s troubles revolve around an exaggeration about his education at Stonehill College, a small Catholic school near Boston where he graduated in 1979. Since announcing Thompson’s hiring in January, Yahoo had included two bachelor’s degrees — one for accounting and the other for computer science — on the executive’s biography. The dual degrees appeared on Yahoo’s website and in an April 27 document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission free business cards.

After being confronted Thursday by Loeb, Yahoo confirmed that Thompson received only an accounting degree from Stonehill. Yahoo has since removed all references to Thompson’s education from its website. The company hadn’t amended its SEC filing with the inaccuracy as of late Friday.

It’s unclear whether the inaccuracy originated with Thompson or someone else at Yahoo.

Even if Thompson didn’t personally write his biography, he almost certainly reviewed the information and should be held accountable for the distortion, said Charles Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.

Yahoo blamed an “inadvertent error.” After that excuse was ridiculed on the Internet, Yahoo issued another statement late Thursday about the board’s intent to look into what happened.

Loeb is trying to oust Thompson as he seeks four seats on Yahoo’s board of directors — one for himself and three for his allies.

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For Express Scripts, Medco Health Solutions will be a very big pill to swallow. Could it bring on a little indigestion?

With $70 billion in revenue last year,  Medco far outsells Express Scripts Inc.’s $46 billion. Medco employs 23,200 people versus 13,100 at Express Scripts.

Yet the smaller pharmacy benefit management company is buying the big one, in a deal that closed on Monday.

Observers are betting that Express Scripts will be able to successfully digest Medco, although they expect burps and hiccups.

“These are two top companies doing the same thing,” says Judson Clark, an analyst at Edward Jones investments in Des Peres. Both handle pharmacy benefits for employer health plans.

“There will be a couple of headaches, sure. But it’s not like the airlines coming together and merging reservation systems and everyone ending up stranded in Tallahassee,” Clark said.

Express Scripts has a track record. This is the third time it has doubled its size or more through acquisitions since 1998.

“If anybody can pull this off, it’s Express Scripts,” said Ed Lawrence, a finance professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, who co-authored a company-financed study of Express Scripts’ economic impact on St. Louis.

Still, mergers produce anxiety — among employees worried about at least $1 billion in cost-cutting, among senior executives who must figure out how to integrate the separate businesses, and among customers who worry whether merger glitches could affect their prescriptions.

The company says it’s working to avoid the latter.

“Service and stability are our job one,” said Express Scripts spokesman Brian Henry.

Although both dispense drugs, the firms have different strengths.

Medco has a reputation as the better company at the nitty-gritty of getting drugs to patients. Express Scripts is best at “understanding what motivates patient behavior,” says Clark.

For instance, Express Scripts is good at getting patients to actually take their drugs, and converting patients to cheaper generic drugs.

Express Scripts will try to take the best of both, which raises the question of which executives will end up running what.

Big mergers set off a game of musical chairs in management, as the company tries to cut costs.

Fear about that “permeates the entire organization,” says Stuart Greenbaum, former dean and professor emeritus at the Washington University business school.

Some firms settle those turf disputes quickly. Others drag them out, cutting executive staff by attrition and internal competition.

All that can have an effect on efficiency.

“You want to get a full day’s work out of people, not have them spending half the day polishing their résumés,” Greenbaum said.

When big companies merge, customers sometimes feel the effect as new leaders change rules and customer-relations staff is shaken up. Competitors often use that opportunity to swipe customers away.

There may be some of that in the Express Scripts deal but probably not much, says analyst Clark. The company’s customers are mainly big employers.

“The process of rebidding is not easy,” says Clark. “It’s not easy for HR to undertake, and they are not eager at the prospect of doing it again just for kicks.”

Putting systems together and closing duplicate operations also can cause headaches.

“The IT side is often a very difficult challenge,” says Greenbaum. “Talk to the airlines, and they’ll tell you that sometimes it blows up in your face and sometimes it goes smoothly.”

Firms often take that slowly, integrating systems over a year or two.

For customers, the question is how much they’ll benefit from the deal.

The merged company may have more clout to demand better prices from drugmakers and the drugstores.

How much patients and employers will share in the savings remains to be seen. Critics say the company’s dominance will allow it to keep much of the savings. The smart management move would be to pass along much of the savings “and be very visible about it,” said Greenbaum. That would head off cries for more regulation later.

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A settlement announced Tuesday between the Mosaic Co. and environmental groups may allow full capacity to resume at a Florida mine that accounts for nearly a fifth of the country’s phosphate rock production.

The Plymouth, Minn.-based company said that with court approval of the settlement, Mosaic could resume full production at its South Fort Meade Mine near Bowling Green, Fla.

“We’re hopeful this agreement provides the foundation to continue our constructive dialogue with these interested stakeholders as we look to the future,” said Richard Mack, Mosaic’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel. “It’s especially encouraging that this settlement includes a significant public benefit by conserving the Peaceful Horse Ranch property.”

The mine has been working at a reduced capacity since 2010 because of a lawsuit over the site’s federal wetlands permit.

Under the settlement, Mosaic will donate the nearly 4,200-acre Peaceful Horse Ranch for permanent conservation and must preserve about 130 acres of land eligible to be mined by the company.

Citi analyst P.J. Juvekar said in a statement Tuesday that full production could add up to $0.30 of earnings per share yearly for the company.

“Assuming court approval of the plan, this settlement should end uncertainty regarding the mine, which has been a drag on the stock over the past 18+ months, in our view,” Juvekar said in the statement.

The complaint was filed by the Sierra Club, along with Manasota-88 and People for Protecting the Peace River. An email seeking comment from the Sierra Club wasn’t immediately returned on Tuesday.

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British Prime Minister David Cameron faced opposition calls to abandon his health-service revamp and cut sales tax as scrutiny of the coalition government

Fiat Group SpA, which controls Chrysler LLC, has reported that full-year earnings more than doubled as Chrysler posted its first profit since 1997.

The company says it made euro1.3 billion ($1.71 billion) in net profit last year, compared with euro520 million a year earlier, as revenue rose 66 percent to euro59.5 billion.

The results exceeded the company’s guidance. Fiat’s trading profit _ or earnings before interest, taxes and one-time items _ was euro2.3 billion, exceeding the target of more than euro2.1 billion.

Fiat said Wednesday that the results reflected higher Chrysler sales, resilient Fiat Group Auto revenues and double-digit growth at the Ferrari luxury brand.

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Current and former Food and Drug Administration officials say in a lawsuit that the agency secretly monitored their private email after they raised concerns that approved medical devices might risk public safety.

The doctors and scientists who researched the products approached members of Congress and the incoming Obama administration to express alarm that the devices were approved over their objections.

Their lawsuit, first reported Monday by The Washington Post, says the agency monitored email sent from their personal Gmail and Yahoo accounts from work computers over two years. It says those emails included messages to congressional staff and drafts of whistleblower complaints.

The staffers say they were legally protected whistleblowers and the monitoring violated their constitutional rights to free speech and against illegal search and seizure, even though a warning on FDA computers said they had no expectation to privacy. The defendants say they were admonished or lost their contracts to work with FDA in retaliation.

The FDA said Monday it would not comment on ongoing litigation.

The lawsuit says the plaintiffs were among those who complained in fall 2008 to members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that senior managers at the Center for Devices and Radiological Health “ordered, intimidated, and coerced FDA experts to modify their scientific reviews, conclusions and recommendations in violation of the law.” Then in January 2009, after Barack Obama’s election but before he was sworn into office, nine FDA employees sent a letter to the Obama transition team complaining of corruption within the FDA device review process that they said was endangering public health.

For example, the FDA scientists alleged that the agency approved the use of computer-aided detection devices with breast mammograms even though they had been determined not to be safe or effective, harming women and resulting in unnecessary public health costs.

The suit says FDA officials began secretly referring to the letter’s signatories as the “FDA 9″ and began the secret monitoring. The suit says the agency used spyware on their government-owned computers that allowed them to take “screen shots,” or pictures of what was on their computer screens without their knowledge.

The scientists’ complaints were the subject of a New York Times article on March 28, 2010, that said FDA brushed aside its own experts’ warnings about the risks of radiation exposure from routinely using powerful CT scans to screen patients for colon cancer.

The lawsuit says lawyers for General Electric Co., which applied for agency approval of CT scans for colon cancer screenings, complained that confidential information may have been leaked to the Times. Agency officials used the letter to make a criminal referral to the Office of Inspector General and attempt to have the plaintiffs investigated and potentially charged with serious crimes, the suit says. But the IG’s office found no evidence of criminal conduct and noted that disclosures relating to public safety to Congress and the media were protected whistleblower activity.

The attorney who filed the suit, National Whistleblowers Center Executive Director Stephen Kohn, said spying on employees who raise health concerns stops others from coming forward in the interest of public safety.

“The FDA’s illegal spying program is not just a problem for the six victims in this case,” Kohn said in a statement Monday. “The day we allow the government to spy on employees based on their lawful whistleblower activities is the day we give up privacy for every honest public servant in America.”

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Turkey’s foreign minister has called for the immediate resumption of talks between Iran and major world powers to end the standoff over Tehran’s disputed nuclear program.

Ahmet Davutoglu also said at a joint news conference with Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi that Turkey was ready to host and “make any other kind of contribution” to talks between Iran and six countries leading negotiations _ the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany.

Salehi said the six powers should enter talks without conditions, otherwise “it is a sign that they do not approve of the negotiations.”

The U.S. and its Western allies suspect Iran wants to develop nuclear weapons. Iran insists its efforts are designed for civilian power generation and research.

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An investigator has denied any role in the death of ailing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky while he was imprisoned in a Moscow jail for tax evasion.

Oleg Silchenko, a senior investigator at the Interior Ministry’s Investigative Department, made his first public appearance at a news conference Thursday.

Magnitsky was imprisoned in 2008 and died of untreated pancreatitis in Nov. 2009. His family blame Silchenko for his continued detention.

Grilled by reporters, Silchenko said he had no powers to recommend the ailing lawyer for extra medical treatment and believed Magnitsky could have pressured witnesses if released us fast cash.

Silchenko is top of a list of dozens of Russian officials barred by the United States from entering the country for his alleged role in the death.

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At your Thanksgiving table, you may have joined millions of Americans giving thanks for the good health, happiness and love in your family.

Polls show that people have grown increasingly appreciative of these elements in their lives as financial matters have become shakier. Here are eight money matters that may make people thankful.

Investor Warren Buffett says his company bought $10.7 billion of IBM stock this year, about a 5.6 percent stake.

Buffett revealed the new investment during an interview on CNBC Monday. Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., will file a full quarterly update on its U.S. stock portfolio Monday afternoon.

Buffett has long refused to invest in high-tech companies because he it’s too difficult to predict which technology businesses will prosper in the long run.

Buffett says he recently changed his view of IBM’s role in industry. So Berkshire bought about 64 million shares since March, or about 5.6 percent of IBM.

Buffett says he believes IBM has a sound plan for the future.

IBM shares rose $1.62 to $189 in premarket trading after rising as high as $190.55 earlier.

Besides investments, Berkshire owns roughly 80 subsidiaries including insurance, railroad and utility firms.

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