The European Commission has fined AliExpress €550 million after concluding that the marketplace failed to meet its obligations under the Digital Services Act to assess and reduce the risks associated with illegal, unsafe, and counterfeit products sold through its platform.
The numbers arrive in clusters, almost daring the eye to become numb. $579.5 million (AUD $830 million) in court-ordered civil penalties, 449.5 million (AUD $644 million) to be returned to consumers and investors, more than 250 investigations, twenty-five criminal convictions etc. Read too quickly, they blur into the familiar arithmetic of regulation, another annual accounting of enforcement activity. Read more carefully, and something else emerges. This was not simply a year in which the Australian Securities and Investments Commission imposed larger penalties than before. It was a year in which nearly every lever available to a financial regulator (civil litigation, criminal prosecution, remediation, market intervention) was pulled with unusual force.
A Massachusetts-based drugmaker, EyePoint Pharmaceuticals, has agreed to pay $4,657,463.18 to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by paying kickbacks to certain ambulatory surgery centers to encourage them to purchase and dispense DEXYCU, an injectable treatment approved for ocular inflammation following cataract surgery. The alleged conduct spans from Jan. 1, 2019, through March 1, 2023. Under separate agreements, EyePoint will also pay an additional $21,518.68 to certain participating states.
Thirty ESG evaluation and data providers had endorsed Japan's Code of Conduct for ESG Evaluation and Data Providers as of June 30, 2026, according to an updated list published by the country's Financial Services Agency (FSA).
There are few assets as carefully protected as the right to call yourself an Olympic sponsor. Companies spend years negotiating for that privilege and millions securing it. Others, seeing the attention the Games inevitably command, sometimes try a less expensive route, such as standing close enough to borrow the glow without ever paying for the light. Italy's competition regulator has decided that six companies crossed that line.
Italy's data protection authority has fined telecommunications provider Wind Tre €1.7156 million after finding serious security deficiencies that enabled attackers to gain unauthorized access to company systems and exfiltrate the personal data of more than 365,000 customers. The decision follows an investigation by the Italian Data Protection Authority, known as the Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali, into two data breaches that the company reported in February 2025.
When hackers gained access to the personal information of roughly 5 million Australians during the 2025 cyberattack on Qantas, the obvious question was whether the airline had failed in its legal duty to protect that data. After nearly a year of preliminary inquiries, Australia's privacy regulator has answered that question, at least for now.