Compliance & Ethics

The Australian Federal Court case against Coles Supermarkets Australia was, on paper, about supermarket shelf pricing. In practice, it became something larger and more uncomfortable for corporate compliance teams. Because once a company trains consumers to trust a label, a slogan, or a pricing program, the legal question is no longer just what the numbers technically say. It becomes whether the overall impression being created can survive scrutiny.

The Federal Trade Commission has announced a $35 million settlement with Shutterstock, accusing the online licensing platform of quietly locking consumers into recurring charges while making it unnecessarily difficult to cancel subscriptions.

The fine that caught people's attention $78 million (PLN 339 million), split between an agricultural machinery company and the executives who ran it) wasn't the largest UOKiK imposed last year. It wasn't even close. But it was, in its way, the most instructive. Because the executives didn't argue they'd ordered the conduct. They argued they hadn't known about it. The court wasn't moved.

Federal authorities have secured one of the largest False Claims Act settlements tied to customs duty evasion after a group of California aluminum companies agreed to pay $549.5 million to resolve allegations they improperly avoided tariffs on imports from China for years by disguising aluminum extrusions as ordinary shipping pallets.

At one point during the scramble around the EU Deforestation Regulation, people in compliance departments were trying to determine whether a shipment of cattle-derived products could be reliably traced back to land parcels that, in some cases, had changed ownership multiple times across jurisdictions with inconsistent land registries and uneven digital infrastructure. There were meetings about satellite imagery. Meetings about geolocation coordinates. Meetings about whether suppliers in rural regions would even understand the documentation requests they were suddenly receiving from European multinationals. Entire teams found themselves discussing forests they would never see.

Italy’s competition authority has started investigating companies tied to the Glovo group and Deliveroo Italy, raising questions about whether the food delivery firms’ public messaging around ethics and social responsibility matched conditions experienced by riders on the ground.

The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets has fined PostNL €6.923 million after the company failed to meet the country’s statutory requirements for timely mail delivery during 2023. According to ACM, only 89.48 percent of qualifying letterbox mail with a five-day delivery obligation arrived on time that year, well below the legal threshold of 95 percent.