Finland's FCCA recently proposed roughly €9.4 million in penalty payments against companies tied to what it described as a long-running purchasing and information-exchange cartel in Finland’s wild berry sector. The alleged conduct stretched from 2013 through 2023 and involved five of the industry’s largest companies: Arctic International, Kaskein Marja, Kiantama, Marja Bothnia Berries, and Polarica.
The ECB’s May 2026 review lands during a time of war in the Middle East, an energy supply shock, and a financial system that had spent the better part of the last few years congratulating itself for surviving everything else, from inflation spikes to rate hikes, banking scares, political fragmentation, and trade disputes. Somehow the machinery kept moving. Markets absorbed the shocks, volatility faded, and investors returned to doing what investors often do after a few quiet weeks: convincing themselves the danger had passed. The ECB does not appear convinced.
New Zealand’s Privacy Commissioner released Phase 1 findings from an inquiry into the incident, concluding that both Health New Zealand and Manage My Health breached Rule 5 of the Health Information Privacy Code by failing to ensure reasonable security safeguards were in place to protect patient information.
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.