Joseph N. DiStefano

1 week ago | inquirer.com | Joseph N. DiStefano

While founders head to prison, investors in Par Funding, the Philadelphia-based Ponzi scheme that cost investors a total of $250 million, now look like they’ll get back more than 80 cents of every $1 they lost. More than 1,500 investors in January and March collected checks totaling $110 million, or about 44 cents for every dollar they put into the defunct Old City small-business lender, with funds taken from company founders and salesmen.

2 weeks ago | miamiherald.com | Joseph N. DiStefano

Merck, the New Jersey-based drug giant, is spending $1 billion on a new Delaware factory to bring production of its best-selling cancer drug Keytruda to the U.S. and speed future drugs to market. Keytruda is currently made in Ireland and by contract manufacturers in the United States. President Donald Trump has complained about Ireland acting as a low-cost drug factory center and tax haven at the expense of U.S. workers and tax collections.

2 weeks ago | inquirer.com | Joseph N. DiStefano

Merck, the New Jersey-based drug giant that started in Philadelphia and is Montgomery County’s largest private employer, is investing nearly $1 billion in a new factory and lab development at DuPont Co.’s former Chestnut Run center outside Wilmington. The complex, dubbed Merck Wilmington Biotech, will produce antibody-drug conjugates, a class of cancer therapies. Merck is known for the cancer-fighting drug Keytruda.

2 weeks ago | inquirer.com | Joseph N. DiStefano

With a staff of 50, $550 million in property loans and other assets, and deposits, revenues, and profits that have doubled since 2020, Philadelphia’s Asian Bank has grown far beyond the storefront Chinatown headquarters it opened in 1999. Besides its current, larger Arch Street headquarters, the bank has added branches in credit-hungry small-business districts on Race Street in Chinatown, Castor Avenue in Northeast Philly, and Passyunk Avenue in South Philly.

2 weeks ago | miamiherald.com | Joseph N. DiStefano

The U.S. government wants to build more military and cargo ships to better compete with China, and Hanwha Philly Shipyard is ready for a larger role in building those ships, Daniel O'Brien, head of Hanwha's Washington, D.C., lobbying arm, said Wednesday on a tour of the facility his company bought for $100 million last year. But first, the shipyard is going to need more room - and more workers, O'Brien said. U.S. Sen.