Italy’s competition watchdog said this week it has opened a probe into Biogen and its Italian subsidiary over allegations the company used control of a critical screening test to box out a lower-cost rival in the market for multiple sclerosis drugs containing natalizumab. The accusation is technical. The implications are not.
This week, the Federal Court of Australia ordered Westpac Banking Corporation to pay a $18.6 million (AUD $26 million) civil penalty after the bank admitted it failed to properly respond to more than 200 hardship notices between 2017 and 2023. The requests came through Westpac and its subsidiary brands, including St George Bank and Bank of Melbourne, and involved customers struggling to keep up with repayments on home loans, credit cards, personal loans, and car loans.
BP recently announced that Albert Manifold was out as Chair and Director after the board raised what it called “serious concerns” related to governance standards, oversight, and conduct. The board’s decision, BP said, was unanimous.
The latest Financial Stability Report, published Tuesday by De Nederlandsche Bank, is nominally about financial stability in the Netherlands. It is also, whether intentionally or not, a document about systems becoming harder to fully see. The concern running through it is not merely that risks exist. Central bankers have always had risks. It is that too many risks are now colliding at once, feeding each other, accelerating each other, and moving faster than the institutions built to contain them.
Buried inside the New Zealand Financial Markets Authority's latest review of New Zealand’s climate disclosure regime is a fairly direct message to companies that have gotten comfortable speaking in broad climate abstractions. The easy part was learning the vocabulary. The harder part is explaining, in plain terms, what actually gets damaged, where, and how badly.
New York State Department of Financial Services Acting Superintendent Kaitlin Asrow issued new guidance advising regulated entities on the kinds of cybersecurity measures they should consider when threat conditions materially worsen. The department pointed specifically to geopolitical instability and the release of frontier AI models as examples of developments that can rapidly change the threat landscape and justify stronger defensive measures.
A ship arrives at port during the plague years. The crew does not disembark. Nobody unloads cargo. Nobody asks for a heat map. They wait forty days. That, as Swiss GRC Day moderator Nikolai Tsenov reminded attendees in Zurich, was one of humanity’s earliest systematic attempts at risk management—quarantine.