Compliance & Ethics

At one point during the scramble around the EU Deforestation Regulation, people in compliance departments were trying to determine whether a shipment of cattle-derived products could be reliably traced back to land parcels that, in some cases, had changed ownership multiple times across jurisdictions with inconsistent land registries and uneven digital infrastructure. There were meetings about satellite imagery. Meetings about geolocation coordinates. Meetings about whether suppliers in rural regions would even understand the documentation requests they were suddenly receiving from European multinationals. Entire teams found themselves discussing forests they would never see.

Italy’s competition authority has started investigating companies tied to the Glovo group and Deliveroo Italy, raising questions about whether the food delivery firms’ public messaging around ethics and social responsibility matched conditions experienced by riders on the ground.

The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets has fined PostNL €6.923 million after the company failed to meet the country’s statutory requirements for timely mail delivery during 2023. According to ACM, only 89.48 percent of qualifying letterbox mail with a five-day delivery obligation arrived on time that year, well below the legal threshold of 95 percent.

The U.S. Department of Justice is attempting to bring a more unified approach to white-collar enforcement with the rollout of what it says is the first Department-wide corporate enforcement policy for criminal cases, a move officials say is designed to provide businesses with greater clarity about how prosecutors will evaluate corporate misconduct.

Switzerland’s financial regulator is proposing a fresh round of anti-money laundering reforms that would sharpen expectations around customer transparency, correspondent banking oversight, and sanctions compliance as global pressure on financial crime controls continues to mount.

Australia’s financial crime regulator is warning that the lines between legitimate commerce and illicit finance are becoming increasingly blurred as criminals exploit artificial intelligence, digital technologies, and global financial systems to hide the movement of illicit funds.

Over the course of 2025, Anti-Money Laundering Authority Chair Bruna Szego traveled across all 27 European Union Member States, meeting directly with the supervisors, financial intelligence units, banks, insurers, crypto firms, accountants, lawyers, and other stakeholders tasked with defending Europe’s financial system from illicit finance.