A11
B USINESS
THE BULLETIN • THURSDAY, APRIL 15, 2021
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33,730.89 +53.62
BRIEFING
Ex-Weyerhaeuser
manager gets
prison for scheme
An ex-finance man-
ager from Weyerhae-
user who stole over $4.5
million from the timber
business was sentenced
Wednesday to nearly five
years in prison.
Susan Tranberg of Eu-
gene also was sentenced
Wednesday to three years
of supervised release and
was ordered to pay over
$5.3 million in restitution ,
Acting U.S. Attorney Scott
Erik Asphaug said.
Starting as early as
June 2004 and until 2019,
Tranberg defrauded Wey-
erhaeuser out of over
$4.5 million by submit-
ting fraudulent invoices
for payment to a fake
vendor she created, ac-
cording to court docu-
ments.
Tranberg had worked
for Weyerhaeuser in
Springfield for more than
40 years. A financial anal-
ysis determined most of
the money was used to
fund expensive dinners,
vacations, wedding ex-
penses and shopping
sprees, Asphaug said.
In 2020, Tranberg was
charged with mail fraud,
aggravated identity theft,
and tax evasion. She
pleaded guilty to all three
charges, according to As-
phaug.
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Fed: Economy
rebounding
A Federal Reserve
survey has found that
the economy was re-
bounding in late Febru-
ary through early April,
helped by billions of
dollars in a new round of
stimulus payments and
the stepped-up rollout of
coronavirus vaccines.
The new survey re-
leased Wednesday
showed that the Fed’s
business contacts around
the country were
expressing more opti-
mism about the econo-
my’s outlook as activity
accelerated.
The survey credited
a range of factors, from
vaccinations to the pay-
ments of up to $1,400
for individuals from the
$1.9 trillion relief package
that President Joe Biden
pushed through Congress
last month.
— Bulletin wire reports
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EURO
$1.1971 +.0025
REDMOND
City sells vacant land for $2.8M
The anonymous buyer plans to build facility
on 14 acres, bring 35 to 60 jobs to Redmond
BY JACKSON HOGAN
The Bulletin
The city of Redmond will
sell 14 acres of city-owned,
vacant land to a construction
materials company planning to
build a large industrial campus
there.
The $2.67 million sale —
unanimously approved by the
Redmond City Council on
Tuesday — will allow for the
eventual creation of 35 to 60
new jobs after the campus is
complete.
“It’s a win-win on all ac-
counts,” Jon Stark, director of
the Redmond Economic De-
velopment Inc. nonprofit, told
the council Tuesday . “It creates
… jobs in the community, it re-
lieves us of some surplus land
and puts some money in the
city’s general fund.”
The company, which man-
ufactures and distributes con-
struction materials, wishes to
remain anonymous for now,
Stark told The Bulletin on
Wednesday.
“They don’t want it out there
until they can tell their story,”
he said.
The city acquired an 18-acre
patch of land, located deep in
Redmond’s industrial east side,
in 2001 with the intentions of
building city water and public
works facilities there, accord-
ing to Bill Duerden, public
MORE COLOR
FOR YOUR PLATE
OSU researcher develops new purple tomato with antioxidant effects
works director.
However, while the city used
4 acres to build a water facil-
ity, the other 14 acres remained
vacant after a different location
was chosen for public works
around 2010, Duerden told the
City Council on Tuesday.
“We no longer have a need
for the 14 acres remaining,” he
said.
See Redmond / A12
OREGON | JOBLESS
Increased
flexibility
set for
overpaid
benefits
BY MIKE ROGOWAY
The Oregonian
Watchdog opens
Facebook probe
Ireland’s privacy reg-
ulator said Wednesday
it has opened an inves-
tigation into Facebook
after data on more than
500 million users was re-
portedly found dumped
online, in a suspected vi-
olation of strict European
Union privacy rules.
The Data Protection
Commission said it de-
cided to start investigat-
ing following “multiple
international media re-
ports” about the data
dump.
News reports earlier
this month said the data
was found on a website
for hackers and contained
information on 533 mil-
lion users from more than
100 countries, including
names, Facebook IDs,
phone numbers, loca-
tions, birthdates and
email addresses.
The watchdog said it
launched the investiga-
tion after it “engaged with
Facebook Ireland,” ques-
tioning it about compli-
ance with privacy rules.
The company responded,
the Irish agency said, sug-
gesting it wasn’t satisfied
with the answers.
Facebook said it’s “co-
operating fully” with the
investigation.
SILVER
$25.52 +.10
Courtesy of Jim Myers/OSU via Capital Press
Jim Myers of Oregon State University holds the new Midnight Roma tomato he developed.
BY SIERRA DAWN MCCLAIN • Capital Press
CORVALLIS —
O
regon State University this week announced a new, university-developed purple tomato
called the Midnight Roma. Jim Myers, 66, a vegetable breeder and professor in OSU’s
College of Agricultural Science, bred the new variety, which follows 10 years after Myers’
development of the Indigo Rose, the first all-purple tomato on the market.
Myers’ new Midnight Roma, a
large, multipurpose tomato, is a
cross between Indigo Rose and Or-
egon Star varieties. Its color appeals
to chefs making eye-catching pastes,
and the tomato is high in anthocya-
nins, which have antioxidant effects
good for human health.
“I think it’ll be popular among
home gardeners, canners and high-
end chefs,” said Myers, the breeder.
“I also think there’s potential for it
go into the processing trade, more
in the specialty processing sector. It
makes a very pretty sauce, very dark
red, as you can imagine.”
The Midnight Roma can be en-
joyed sliced or in paste. Varietals
grown for paste, Myers said, are usu-
ally dense and “meaty” with fewer
seeds, but often weak in flavor be-
cause the tomato’s placenta — the
gel and seed region — packs the fla-
vor. Fresh market varietals are often
seedy and flavorful but don’t make
great paste.
The Midnight Roma, Myers said,
is both meaty and seedy, making it a
good choice for both markets.
It also has the potential to at-
tract health-conscious consumers
because it is rich in anthocyanins,
which are anti-inflammatory, an-
ti-microbial and linked to other
health benefits.
See Tomato / A12
A Senate committee voted
unanimously Tuesday to give
the Oregon Employment De-
partment more flexibility to
allow jobless workers to keep
the money when the state pays
them too much.
Oregon typically recoups
that overpaid money from fu-
ture benefits payments. That
practice was designed to re-
duce the pressure on unem-
ployed workers to pay back
money, when the state makes
a mistake, by deducing it from
future payments instead of de-
manding that workers pay up
right away.
In practice, though, it often
means that workers miss out
on benefits when they need it
most — after they’ve lost their
jobs.
So Senate Bill 172 would
give the state more latitude to
waive collection of overpaid
benefits, and it would put a
five-year ceiling on the state’s
ability to reclaim the money.
The state already had some
flexibility to forgive overpay-
ments, in cases when collecting
the money “would be against
equity and good conscience.”
The bill doesn’t change the
state’s practices in recouping
money paid in cases of fraud.
The Senate Committee on
Labor and Business approved
the bill on a 5-0 vote Tuesday,
with the bipartisan endorse-
ment signaling it has strong
prospects before the full Legis-
lature. It now awaits a vote by
the full Oregon Senate.
The bill doesn’t change
the state’s practices in
recouping money paid
in cases of fraud.
Coinbase soars in market debut, valued near $86B
BY MICHELLE CHAPMAN AND
ALEX VEIGA
The Associated Press
Coinbase made a rousing
debut Wednesday on Wall
Street, with shares of the digi-
tal currency exchange rising as
high as $429, briefly giving it a
market value over $100 billion.
Coinbase Global Inc.‘s initial
public offering happened with
cryptocurrency chatter seem-
ingly everywhere, even at the
U.S. Federal Reserve. Digital
currencies are being incorpo-
rated into business plans and
accepted for payment by major
corporations like Tesla and Visa.
The San Francisco-based
company’s listing on a public
stock exchange is seen by some
as an inflection point for dig-
ital currencies, as Coinbase’s
fortunes are closely tied to Bit-
coin, the most popular crypto-
currency. Bitcoin’s price topped
$64,000 on Wednesday, up from
$29,000 at the start of the year,
and Coinbase said recently that
first-quarter revenue should to-
tal around $1.8 billion, exceed-
ing its revenue for all of 2020.
Shares of Coinbase are listed
on the Nasdaq under the ticker
“COIN,” and closed at $328.28,
up 31% from the $250 reference
price set by Nasdaq ahead of the
first trade. That puts Coinbase’s
market value at $85.78 billion.
That market value makes
Coinbase one of the biggest
publicly traded U.S. companies
— just 93 companies in the S&P
500 index have a higher value.
Coinbase’s value is close to the
combined market value of Nas-
daq Inc., which runs the Nasdaq
Stock Market, and Interconti-
nental Exchange, which owns
the New York Stock Exchange.
See Coinbase / A12
Richard Drew/AP
Coinbase employees celebrate Wednesday outside the Nasdaq Market-
Site, in New York’s Times Square.