Compliance & Ethics

New consumer protection rules against greenwashing began applying on September 27, bringing into force a set of restrictions that reach directly into the words, labels and environmental promises businesses place in front of consumers. Directive (EU) 2024/825, adopted in February 2024, amends the EU’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and Consumer Rights Directive. Member States had until March 27, 2026, to transpose it into national law. Those measures have now entered into application.

The United States has asked an EU court for a place in the legal fight over the European Commission’s €120 million fine against X, arguing that the case reaches beyond one social media platform and into the limits of European authority over American companies and their owners.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced an investigation into data center developments that have not responded to the Texas Water Development Board’s Water Use Survey. His office said the investigation is ongoing and is intended to ensure data centers provide accurate, current information about their water use.

The European Banking Authority has urged the European Commission to use its review of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation to strengthen safeguards around certain stablecoin arrangements, clarify which crypto-assets fall within the law and consider bringing crypto lending under regulatory rules. The recommendations amount to an early accounting of where Europe’s landmark crypto regime is holding and where experience has begun to expose uncertainty.

For nearly a decade, retailers buying pet food and supplies from Plaček Pet Products were not entirely free to decide what those products would cost when they reached the shelf. The Czech Office for the Protection of Competition said the distributor set minimum retail prices for dog and cat food and other pet supplies from Jan. 17, 2013, through March 3, 2022, requiring its customers to follow them. The conduct has now resulted in a fine of about $1.7 million (CZK 36.438 million).

For nearly seven years, transport companies serving the Polish supermarket chain agreed not to compete with one another for drivers, according to Poland’s Office of Competition and Consumer Protection, or UOKiK. Moving from one participating carrier to another could require the permission of the employer the driver was trying to leave. Without it, the driver could be kept out of the distribution center for months.

Europe’s data protection authorities have never lacked ways to punish a GDPR violation. They can warn an organization, reprimand it, order it to change what it is doing, restrict its processing or stop that processing altogether. And, of course, they can fine it. What has been less settled is how an authority should decide among those choices.