GRC Report Staff

On Tuesday, the Australian Federal Court ordered Harvey Norman Holdings and Latitude Finance Australia to pay a combined $35.9 million (AUD $55 million) after finding they engaged in misleading conduct and made false or misleading representations in a nationwide advertising campaign that ran between January 2020 and August 2021. Harvey Norman was ordered to pay $22.8 million (AUD $35 million), while Latitude was ordered to pay $13.1 million (AUD $20 million). According to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), the combined penalty is among the largest it has secured in a case involving misleading conduct related to financial products and services.

The European Central Bank has spent the past year teaching its collateral framework a new habit. First it learned to look at corporate bonds through the lens of climate-related transition risk. Now it will do the same for a broader class of assets that sit behind the Eurosystem's lending operations.

The Italian Data Protection Authority imposed a €2 million fine on Lusha, the U.S.-based data broker, ordering it to stop processing the personal data of individuals in Italy while deleting the data it already holds. Read closely, the ruling is less about the existence of a commercial contact database than about what happens when that database is continuously refreshed, expanded and monetized over time.

The President of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) has opened proceedings against several companies involved in condo hotel developments, alleging they misled consumers about investment returns while failing to explain the costs and risks that could emerge long after the brochures had been put away. The investigations also challenge contract terms that, according to the regulator, deprived owners of meaningful control over properties they had purchased and punished those who tried to exercise it.

Dallas-based Magnolia Diagnostics, its owners, and a group of investors have agreed to pay the United States $24 million to resolve allegations that the laboratory billed Medicare for thousands of medically unnecessary respiratory pathogen panel (RPP) tests performed on seniors undergoing COVID-19 testing. Of that total, Magnolia and its owners will pay $19.2 million to resolve allegations under the False Claims Act, while investors will pay a further $4.8 million to resolve civil claims for unjust enrichment, payment by mistake, and claims under the Federal Debt Collection Procedures Act arising from distributions they received from the company.

The Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) has identified several areas where fund managers should strengthen their compliance and internal audit functions, despite finding that many firms have those functions broadly well organized.

Banks have spent centuries refining a single business model. They borrow trust, transform it into financial activity, and spend every day trying not to lose it. That is what makes a recent reflection from Bank of Ireland more interesting than it first appears. On its surface, it reads like another executive essay about artificial intelligence, full of familiar references to fraud detection, customer service, compliance monitoring, and operational efficiency. Those examples are almost expected now. Every large financial institution has a similar catalogue of use cases.