Compliance & Ethics

Pre-paid mobile phones are supposed to be simple. You top up when you want, use the service when you need it, and stop when you don’t. According to Poland’s consumer watchdog, that promise quietly broke down for thousands of Orange Polska customers. On 4 February 2026, Poland’s Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) announced that it had fined Orange Polska roughly $8.5 million (PLN 34,030,000) for unlawfully charging fees to pre-paid customers who were deemed “inactive.”

Spain’s competition watchdog has come down hard on the Repsol Group, handing out €20.5 million in fines and temporarily shutting several of its companies out of public fuel contracts after finding that they squeezed rivals out of the diesel market during the most volatile months of 2022.

A UK tribunal has backed the Financial Conduct Authority’s findings against Banque Havilland, concluding that the bank and two senior figures deliberately devised a scheme intended to undermine the Qatari economy and then lied to regulators and the court when the plan came to light.

South Korea’s competition watchdog has fined seven ready-mixed concrete manufacturers and sellers for running a coordinated price-fixing and market-allocation scheme that effectively shut down competition in the private construction market in the Gwangyang area.

Italy’s competition authority has opened an investigation into fashion brand Harmont & Blaine, alleging the company may have crossed the line in how it referenced the Milan-Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in its marketing.

Two recent guilty pleas by former employees of TD Bank have drawn renewed attention to the role insider access can play in facilitating financial crime — particularly when combined with weaknesses in transaction monitoring, escalation, and account oversight.

Poland’s consumer protection authority has fined PKO Bank Polski nearly $19.9 million (PLN 79,291,800) after concluding that the bank used contract language that gave it sweeping control over changes to consumer loan interest rates, with little clarity for borrowers on when or why costs could increase. The nearly $19.9 million (PLN 79,291,800) fine reflects both the duration of the practice and the scale of the bank’s consumer business, according to the regulator.