The French government has fined online fashion retailer Shein €40 million after uncovering widespread deceptive practices in how the company advertised price reductions and promoted its environmental credentials.
Key Holding, a Delaware-based logistics firm with global operations, just learned the hard way that in the world of sanctions, ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s rather expensive. After acquiring a Colombian freight subsidiary in late 2021, the company failed to realize that the acquisition brought new obligations under U.S. sanctions laws. That oversight ultimately led to 36 unauthorized shipments to Cuba, triggering a $608,825 settlement with the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
Five payment firms in Singapore just learned a costly lesson about weak anti-money laundering controls and why it won’t fly under the radar. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has issued $710,000 (S$960,000) in composition penalties after uncovering serious compliance failures across five licensed payment institutions. The firms (Remsea, Arcade Plaza Traders, J-Dee Remittance, Mobile Community Tech, and OxPay SG) were found to have fallen short of core safeguards meant to prevent financial crime.
The UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has stepped up its efforts to combat cross-border corruption by officially joining the International Anti-Corruption Coordination Centre (IACCC), an elite global law enforcement alliance housed within the UK’s National Crime Agency.
Meta is back in the hot seat in Brussels, just months after it was slapped with a €200 million fine for breaching the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). This time, the European Commission is warning that Meta could face daily penalty payments if its updated “pay-or-consent” model still fails to meet the bloc’s legal standards.
In a parting shot that sounds more like a call to arms than a quiet policy recommendation, Australia’s competition watchdog has officially closed its five-year deep dive into digital platform services, and without regulatory reform, consumers and small businesses will keep getting steamrolled.
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) has imposed a combined $8.5 million in penalties on the Dutch affiliates of Deloitte, PwC, and EY after uncovering widespread cheating on mandatory internal training exams by hundreds of professionals across all three firms.