Big Banks and Dirty Money

Toronto-Dominion has joined the dubious club of large companies that have paid a penalty of $1 billion or more in a single case of misconduct. It achieved that distinction with the recent slew of announcements by the U.S. Justice Department and several financial regulators that the book was being thrown at the Canadian bank’s U.S. subsidiary TD Bank for widespread failures in meeting its obligations to prevent the use of its operations for money laundering by criminals and tax evaders.

TD Bank was hit with $1.9 billion in criminal fines by the DOJ and more than a billion from the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. It all came to $3.09 billion in penalties. Adding these to Toronto-Dominion’s previous cases documented in Violation Tracker raises the bank’s aggregate penalties in the U.S. to nearly $4 billion, far and away the highest total for any parent company headquartered in Canada.

Looking specifically at penalties for anti-money-laundering (AML) deficiencies, Toronto-Dominion is now at the top of the list in that category, overtaking Denmark’s Danske Bank, which has hit with $2 billion in criminal fines by the DOJ in 2022.

Other banks with the highest penalties for AML and related Bank Secrecy Act violations include: JPMorgan Chase ($811 million), HSBC ($665 million), U.S. Bancorp ($528 million), Deutsche Bank ($491 million), and Capital One ($390 million). The non-bank with the largest total is Western Union at $740 million.

AML violations are not limited to the United States. In the new Violation Tracker Global, which covers cases against large corporations in 45 countries (including the U.S.), AML is one of the most frequent offenses, with total penalties equal to more than $20 billion imposed by regulators and courts in three dozen countries.

The U.S. by far contributes the most ($15 billion) to that total. Other countries with the most AML penalties against large corporations include Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, each with between $1 billion and $2 billion. Next are Denmark and Sweden with totals between $500 million and $700 million.

Outside the United States, the largest individual AML cases include: a $916 million penalty in Australia against Westpac Banking Corporation; a $900 million penalty in the Netherlands against ING Bank; a $675 million penalty in Denmark against Danske Bank; a $575 million penalty in the Netherlands against ABN AMRO; a $529 million penalty in Australia against Commonwealth Bank; a $397 million penalty in Sweden against Swedbank; and a $350 million penalty against NatWest in the United Kingdom.

Toronto-Dominion had one AML penalty outside the U.S.—a penalty equal to less than $7 million in its home country of Canada.

These figures suggest that large banks everywhere have a problem complying with AML restrictions. That is probably because doing business with clients flush with dubious cash is simply too lucrative for them to resist. Large penalties imposed in the U.S. and a few other countries may have some deterrent effect, but regulators and prosecutors need to find more effective forms of punishment.

Note: The new TD Bank cases will be added to Violation Tracker and Violation Tracker Global as part of updates that are being prepared.

Violation Tracker Goes Global

Violation Tracker Global has arrived. The new database, covering corporate crime and misconduct in 45 countries, is free to search at violationtrackerglobal.org.

VT Global is structured much like the U.S. and UK versions of Violation Tracker, but with an important difference: it focuses exclusively on cases linked to a universe of 1,600 large multinational corporations and their subsidiaries in the period since 2010. The database contains more than 50,000 penalties imposed on those companies by 700 regulatory agencies and other government bodies, including subsets of the data from the U.S. and the UK Trackers. Other countries covered are from both the Global North (such as Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and 17 members of the European Union) and the Global South (such as Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and India). More countries will be added in the future.

The cases in Violation Tracker Global are divided into eight broad offense groups: Competition/Antitrust, Consumer Protection, Employment, Environment, Financial, Government Contracting, Healthcare, and Safety. Each entry is also tagged with one of about 100 more specific offense categories, such as privacy/data protection violations, bribery, money laundering, and workplace safety. Penalties are shown both in the original currency and the U.S. dollar equivalent at the time of the penalty announcement.

Because of agency disclosure limitations, Violation Tracker Global does not have data in every category for all 45 countries. Particularly frustrating is the fact that regulators in numerous countries, including most of those in the European Union, do not make detailed enforcement information available in two categories: environmental and labor standards. Many of these same countries post extensive data on cases in categories such as banking, securities, and competition/antitrust. Where major cases have become public despite their absence from agency websites, we have created entries using reliable secondary sources.

This unevenness in disclosure practices is part of the reason financial institutions appear so prominently in Violation Tracker Global. The nearly 300 banks, insurance companies, and asset managers included in the database account for more than 40 percent of the total penalties, far more than any other sector. Seven of the 10 parent companies with the largest penalty totals are banks, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, UBS, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank.

Banks are also the biggest repeat offenders. Looking only at penalties of $1 million or more, the parents with the most cases of that size are UBS (114), Bank of America (111), JPMorgan Chase (101), and Citigroup (98). Two banks, HSBC and Citigroup, have been penalized in more countries than any other parent companies.

Plenty of corporations other than banks have substantial penalty totals. These include Volkswagen ($30 billion), BP ($26 billion), and Apple ($19 billion). Overall, 95 parent companies have received $1 billion or more in cumulative penalties since 2010.

Violation Tracker Global is a work in progress. Going forward, my colleagues and I will add information from more countries and seek to fill gaps in the online data through methods such as open records requests. In some countries, however, strict privacy rules will prevent us from obtaining full data. The data we have assembled so far makes it clear that illegality on the part of giant corporations is a worldwide phenomenon.

We hope Violation Tracker Global will be a useful tool for those promoting corporate accountability everywhere.

The Corporate Lawbreakers Involved in the Port Labor Dispute

The decision by the International Longshoremen’s Association to strike ports on the East and Gulf Coasts has prompted numerous media outlets to produce unflattering stories about union president Harold Daggett and what is depicted as his lavish lifestyle.

I have not seen much reporting on the ILA’s adversaries—the corporate members of the employer group known as the United States Maritime Alliance. The group’s website lists about 40 members, among which are some of the largest multinational shipping corporations and terminal operators in the world.

These companies have become more familiar to me as I have been gathering data for the new Violation Tracker Global database, which my colleagues and I will release soon. USMA members show up frequently in data from regulatory agencies in various countries. Here is a preview of what Violation Tracker Global will reveal about these shippers.

One of the USMA members is an American subsidiary of Norway’s Wallenius Wilhelmsen Group. Since 2010, units of the shipping company have racked up regulatory penalties equal to more than US$440 million. Most of these were for anti-competitive practices. The biggest case was a $256 million penalty imposed by the European Commission in 2018 for participating in an illegal cartel controlling the market for vehicle shipping. Wallenius Wilhelmsen has also been fined in Australia, Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea and the United States.

Another USMA member is a unit of Japan’s Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha, known as K Line. Since 2010, K Line has been penalized more than $240 million for similar anti-competitive practices. The largest case was a $67 million criminal fine imposed by the U.S. Justice Department for participation in a conspiracy to fix prices, allocate customers, and rig bids for shipping services for roll-on, roll-off cargo, such as cars and trucks. K Line has also been fined in Australia, Canada, Chile, China, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, and South Korea.

One of the biggest USMA members is Denmark’s Maersk, which participates directly and through its subsidiaries APM Terminals and Hamburg Sud. Since 2010, Maersk and all its subsidiaries have racked up about $45 million in penalties. The largest portion of that was a 2012 U.S. case in which Maersk Line Limited had to pay the federal government $31.9 million to resolve allegations that it submitted false claims in connection with contracts to transport cargo in shipping containers to support U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Among other things, Maersk units were fined by Russian authorities for anti-competitive practices and by British authorities for an offshore oil spill.

Also on the membership list is CSAV, a Chilean shipping company whose fines in Violation Tracker Global amount to $25 million. Those include competition cases brought by the European Commission and in China, Italy, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, and the United States. France’s CMA CGA has total fines of just under $25 million. It was also fined by the European Commission and in Brazil, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Opponents of the ILA are arguing that the union’s fight against automation will impede efficiency and lead to higher shipping costs. Yet, as the information in Violation Tracker Global will show, the shippers themselves have already been boosting costs through price-fixing and other anti-competitive practices across their global operations.

Violation Tracker Global will be available starting on October 8 at:
https://violationtrackerglobal.goodjobsfirst.org/

Challenging Corporate Greenwashing

Large corporations like to tout their environmental initiatives. The problem is that their claims are often exaggerated, misleading or completely unfounded. And rarely are they called to account for their deception.

Recently, there have been two exceptions to the rule, involving the petroleum industry, which has long been one of the most brazen practitioners of greenwashing. California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced the filing of a lawsuit against Exxon Mobil, alleging that it engaged in what the AG called “a decades-long campaign of deception that caused and exacerbated the global plastics pollution crisis.”

Bonta accused Exxon Mobil, a leading producer of the polymers used to produce single-use plastics, of employing “misleading public statements and slick marketing” to promote the idea that recycling is an adequate way to deal with the plastics pollution crisis.

The lawsuit, which seeks to get Exxon Mobil to cease making misleading statements and pay damages, bears a resemblance to previous actions against the corporation for its long history of denying the reality of the climate crisis and the major role the oil industry has played in exacerbating global warming.

Over in South Africa, another oil giant, France’s TotalEnergies, was recently found to have made misleading statements about its commitment to sustainable development. The Advertising Regulatory Board, acting on a complaint brought by the environmental group Fossil Free South Africa, based its ruling on the simple fact that the petroleum company’s core business is antithetical to sustainability.

The advertising board could also have looked at the environmental record of TotalEnergies. As shown in Violation Tracker, the company has paid more than $60 million in environmental penalties in the United States. It also paid $15 million to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by knowingly underpaying royalties owed on natural gas produced from federal and Indian leases. And it paid nearly $400 million to settle foreign bribery allegations.

As will soon be shown in Violation Tracker Global, TotalEnergies has also had regulatory challenges in other countries. For example, in 2010 a French appeals court upheld a 200 million euro judgment against the company in connection with a large oil spill by the tanker Erika off the coast of Brittany.

Of course, Exxon Mobil also has a checkered compliance record. Violation Tracker records more than $2 billion in environmental penalties in the U.S since 2000.  That total would have been considerably larger if the Supreme Court had not slashed a multi-billion-dollar damage award stemming from the giant oil spill by the company’s Valdez supertanker off the coast of Alaska. Violation Tracker Global will contain $3 million in environmental penalties in other countries, especially Canada.

Supreme Court rulings such as the Citizens United case emboldened corporations to assert their free speech rights. Yet when that speech denies scientific reality and contributes to environmental devastation, society needs to respond. California’s lawsuit will not solve the plastics crisis, but it will help to make the case that Exxon Mobil is part of the problem rather than the solution.

Note: Violation Tracker Global will be launched in October

Cigna SLAPPs the FTC

Pharmaceutical companies, the big pharmacy chains and the middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, have been taking pains to blame one another for the high cost of prescription drugs. It is not unusual for business groups with conflicting positions to engage in this sort of finger-pointing, but now a major PBM is attacking a federal regulatory agency for criticizing its practices.

In a highly unusual and objectionable step, Cigna, parent of PBM Express Scripts, has filed a lawsuit against the Federal Trade Commission, seeking to force the agency to retract a recent interim report depicting PBMs as “powerful middlemen inflating drug costs and squeezing main street pharmacies.”

The FTC report points out that the market for PBM services has become highly concentrated, and the largest PBMs are now owned by the largest health insurers (as in Cigna’s ownership of Express Scripts) or pharmacy chains (CVS control of Caremark). “As a result of this high degree of consolidation and vertical integration,” the report states, “the leading PBMs can now exercise significant power over Americans’ access to drugs and the prices they pay.”

Cigna is certainly within its rights to disagree with and criticize the report, as the company did in a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal. Yet Cigna did more than that. Its lawsuit, filed in federal court in Missouri, accuses the FTC of defamation and of violating the company’s due process rights. It seeks to have the report expunged from the FTC website along with “any other relief the Court deems just and equitable.”

Although the complaint does not explicitly ask for monetary damages, the action bears a close resemblance to the SLAPP suits filed by corporations seeking to silence their critics by causing them severe financial harm. This kind of tactic is seen, for example, in the lawsuit being pursued against Greenpeace by the pipeline company Energy Transfer. Like the SLAPP suits brought against NGOs, the Cigna action seems designed to intimidate—both the FTC and by extension its other critics.

Cigna’s claim it has been defamed ignores the fact that the company’s track record is hardly unblemished. Violation Tracker contains more than 200 entries for Cigna and its subsidiaries, with total penalties of $746 million.

Express Scripts accounts for about $30 million of that total, stemming from cases such as a $3.2 million settlement with the Massachusetts Attorney General in 2022 to resolve allegations the company failed to follow prescription pricing procedures designed to keep costs down and prevent overcharges in the state’s workers compensation insurance system.

Accredo, a specialty pharmacy owned by Express Scripts, paid $60 million in 2015 to resolve federal allegations that it received illegal kickbacks, in the form of patient referrals and other benefits, from the pharmaceutical company Novartis in exchange for promoting refills for its drug Exjade.

It is unacceptable for Cigna, or any other company, to seek to muzzle a federal regulator through the use of the legal system. Hopefully, the court will see the danger of this lawsuit and dismiss it promptly.

Apple Loses Its Sweet Irish Tax Deal

When governments in the United States decide to give special tax breaks to large corporations, the sky is the limit and no one can challenge that largesse. As Apple just learned to the tune of about $14 billion, things are different in the European Union.

The EU is much stricter about the tax benefits and other forms of financial assistance that can be given to companies. What is called state aid is not banned entirely, but it is supposed to be used only when it is “exceptionally justified” and does not distort competition.

Moreover, the European Commission can bring legal action when it believes that a member state has awarded state aid improperly, with the remedy being that the company has to give back the money.

Some state and local governments in the U.S. use procedures know as clawbacks to recover economic development assistance from companies that fail to meet job-creation or other promises they made to receive aid. The European Commission cases, by contrast, are not related to company performance but are instead  based on an argument that the aid was illegitimate to begin with.

EU member states are supposed to get prior approval for state aid awards. Yet they often adopt practices, especially with regard to taxes, that the Commission may later decide constitute improper aid. That is what happened with Apple, which had received special rulings in Ireland dating back to the early 1990s that allowed it to avoid paying billions of euros in taxes in that country. Those rulings allowed two Irish subsidiaries of Apple that held valuable intellectual property licenses to exclude profits linked to those licenses from their taxable income in Ireland.

In 2016 the Commission challenged that arrangement and ordered Ireland to recover the aid. At the behest of both Apple and the Irish government, a lower court rescinded that order in 2020. The EU’s highest legal authority, the Court of Justice, just ruled the other way and put Apple on the hook for about 13 billion euros.

Legal disputes over state aid are common in the EU. Since 1999 the Commission has brought more than 300 challenges and forced companies to repay billions of euros. Yet it is also common for deep-pocketed corporations to appeal those decisions—and often they succeed. Amazon, for example, successfully appealed a ruling by the Commission against its tax deal with Luxembourg.

From what I can tell, the largest case prior to Apple in which a Commission challenge survived appeals was one in which the electric utility EDF had to pay back over 1 billion euros to the French government.  When the Commission announced its action in 2015, the EU’s top competition regulator, Margrethe Vestager, was quoted as saying: “Whether private or public, large or small, any undertaking operating in the Single Market must pay its fair share of corporation tax. The Commission’s investigation confirmed that EDF received an individual, unjustified tax exemption which gave it an advantage to the detriment of its competitors, in breach of EU State aid rules.”

The Apple ruling reinforces the idea that special tax breaks are harmful both to competition and to fair taxation. We are a long way from that realization in the U.S., where tax deals and other incentives are widely treated as corporate entitlements.

Note: The Apple and EDF cases, along with much more, will be included in the forthcoming Violation Tracker Global.

Prosecuting the Boss

A courtroom in Germany is currently the scene of a rare occurrence in the business world: the trial of a high-level executive for corporate crimes. Martin Winterkorn, the former top executive of Volkswagen, is facing charges of commercial fraud, market manipulation and making false statements.

Arguably, he should be facing even more serious allegations. Winterkorn is being belatedly tried in connection with the vast conspiracy in which Volkswagen executives conspired to deceive regulators and the public about the environmental impact of its diesel cars. By rigging the vehicles so their emissions appeared to be within legal limits when they were actually much higher, VW was responsible for releasing vast amounts of extra pollution into the air. The health effects are incalculable.

Winterkorn’s trial, delayed for health reasons, comes nine years after the emissions scandal erupted. During that time, the company has faced perhaps the most wide-ranging regulatory barrage in business history.

In the United States, VW paid a series of enormous penalties. These included a $14.7 billion settlement with the federal government and the state of California announced in 2016. The deal included $10 billion to be used for buying back vehicles with the illegal defeat devices and $4 billion to mitigate pollution from the cars and invest in green vehicle technology.

The following year, VW paid another $4 billion to settle a case brought by the Federal Trade Commission concerning another group of vehicles. The company pled guilty to three felony counts and paid a criminal penalty of $2.8 billion.

VW also faced regulatory actions and lawsuits around the world. Here are some of the most notable.

In its home country of Germany, VW was fined the equivalent of $1.2 billion in a case brought by government prosecutors and another $900 million in a lawsuit brought by the Federation of German Consumer Organizations.

In a case brought by Environment and Climate Change Canada, VW paid a fine equal to $150 million. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission fined VW the equivalent of $86 million for deceiving customers about compliance with Australian diesel emissions standards.

India’s National Green Tribunal fined VW 5 billion rupees (US$71 million) for installing the cheating devices. South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission fined VW the equivalent of $31 million for false advertising on vehicle emissions. Among the other countries that penalized VW are Poland ($31 million), Brazil ($13 million), and the Netherlands ($536,000).

As important as these cases have been in highlighting VW’s egregious misconduct and extracting financial penalties, the individual prosecution of Winterkorn could have a greater long-term impact. Even though he is no longer employed by the company (he resigned under pressure in 2015), his trial is a demonstration of how a high-level executive can be held personally accountable for misdeeds under his watch. This is especially true in a case such as Winterkorn’s in which the executive is accused of committing some of those misdeeds himself.

If convicted, Winterkorn, 77, is unlikely to spend time behind bars. But a guilty verdict would send a strong signal to other unscrupulous executives.

Note: the enforcement actions discussed above (and much more) will be included in the forthcoming Violation Tracker Global.

Attacking Price Manipulation

Throughout Joe Biden’s time in office, critics have complained he has not done enough to address high grocery prices. Now that his replacement as the Democratic presidential nominee has come forth with a plan to deal with the problem, many of those same critics are accusing Kamala Harris of going too far.

A wide range of pundits are particularly scandalized at Harris’s critique of price-gouging. It is perfectly valid to question whether her policies would be effective, but many commentators are trotting out simplistic and outdated economic principles to claim that corporate price manipulation is non-existent.

These believers in the supremacy of market forces are apparently unaware that the food sector is a hotbed of anti-competitive practices. This is especially true in the meat industry, where a small number of dominant corporations have had to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and settlements to resolve allegations that they collude to keep prices high.

Take the case of JBS, the giant Brazilian corporation that owns U.S. companies such as the poultry producer Pilgrim’s Pride and the beef producer Swift. As shown in Violation Tracker, JBS and its subsidiaries have paid out over $200 million in class action antitrust lawsuits since 2021. Pilgrim’s Pride was also sentenced to pay $107 million in criminal penalties after pleading guilty to federal charges of participating in a conspiracy to fix prices and rig bids for broiler chicken products.

Tyson Foods, another poultry goliath, has paid out over $120 million in class action settlements over the past three years, including one case in which it had to hand over $99 million. In the pork industry, Smithfield Foods, owned by the Chinese corporation WH Group, has paid around $200 million in price-fixing settlements.

Price-fixing conspiracies have also been alleged in the tuna industry, in which StarKist paid a criminal penalty of $100 million, as well as in milk processing, peanut processing and other food sectors. In 2020 the National Milk Producers Federation agreed to pay $220 million to settle litigation alleging it sought to boost prices through a program to reduce the number of dairy cows. There was even a $28 million settlement involving a mushroom marketing cooperative.

Aside from their illegal collusion on prices, food companies have been accused of entering into illegal agreements designed to suppress wages. A federal court in Oklahoma recently gave preliminary approval to a settlement in which Pilgrim’s Pride will pay $100 million. Other poultry processors such as Tyson and Perdue previously agreed to pay a total of tens of millions of dollars more.

Price-fixing is not exactly the same thing as price-gouging. The first involves illegal agreements among purported competitors, while the other may be committed by a powerful company acting on its own. Price-gouging can be illegal in certain circumstances under state law, especially if it happens during an emergency. Yet it is not, alas, illegal for companies to jack up prices in most circumstances.

That’s why all chief executives of food companies are not being led away in handcuffs. Yet it is all the more reason for the federal government to devise innovative ways to get corporations to bring down prices that escalated through market manipulation of one form or another.

A New DOJ Payday for Whistleblowers

Over the past decade, the Securities and Exchange Commission has paid out around $2 billion to individuals who provided information that led to successful enforcement actions against rule-breaking corporations. The awards can amount to tens of millions of dollars and sometimes reach the nine-figure level. More than a dozen other federal agencies such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have similar incentive programs.

The Justice Department recently announced that it will jump on the whistleblower bandwagon with a pilot program designed to assist in the prosecution of corporate crimes. DOJ’s initiative will cover certain crimes involving financial institutions, from traditional banks to cryptocurrency businesses; foreign corruption involving misconduct by companies; domestic corruption involving misconduct by companies; and healthcare fraud schemes involving private insurance plans.

To be eligible for an award, someone must provide DOJ with original non-public information that leads to a successful prosecution with a corporate penalty of at least $1 million. The whistleblower, who must not have participated in the illegal activity, could receive up to 30 percent of the first $100 million in net proceeds and 5 percent of proceeds between $100 million and $500 million. That means that a whistleblower could receive as much as $55 million.

Whistleblowing is not entirely new to DOJ. The department has long employed the False Claims Act qui tam program to investigate fraud against the federal government by contractors and Medicare healthcare providers. Many of the nearly 4,000 False Claims Act cases in Violation Tracker were made possible by whistleblowers. These cases are handled as civil matters, whereas the new pilot program will cover criminal charges.

DOJ sees the whistleblower program as part of its broader effort to encourage corporations to self-report when they detect illegal behavior within their ranks. The department took the unusual step of structuring the program so that whistleblowers remain eligible for an award if they first report the misconduct to corporate superiors and the company in turn discloses it to DOJ.

It would be ill-advised for the department to offer leniency deals to companies that engage in self-reporting only after learning that a whistleblower is ready to go public. Such deals are meant to incentivize companies to come forward of their own volition, not when the boom is about to be lowered.

Some critics complain that the DOJ pilot is deficient in that it does not adequately protect whistleblowers from retaliation. The program description deals with the issue by saying that the department could respond to retaliation by declining to award the company cooperation credit and/or “institute appropriate enforcement action.” DOJ would do well to adopt procedures like those in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act providing specific remedies for whistleblowers who experience retaliation.

Despite these limitations, it is encouraging that DOJ is adopting a practice for its criminal cases that has a long track record of success in bringing to light corporate wrongdoing of a civil nature. Let’s hope that this approach will put more pressure on rogue companies to clean up their act.

The World Against Google

The decision by a federal judge declaring Google’s search business to be an illegal monopoly came just in time. Several chief executives and Silicon Valley billionaires had begun to openly pressure Kamala Harris to commit to ousting Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission because of her aggressive antitrust policies. That arrogant and clumsy lobbying effort was effectively torpedoed by the blockbuster court ruling.

It should come as no surprise to have Google found guilty of anti-competitive practices. Earlier this year, another federal court gave final approval to a settlement in which Google agreed to pay $90 million to resolve allegations that its Play Store practices violated antitrust law.

Google and its parent Alphabet Inc. have been facing legal challenges to their practices around the world. Most notable have been the conflicts with the European Union, which has imposed penalties of nearly $10 billion. These include a $5 billion fine in 2018 for putting illegal restrictions on Android device manufacturers and mobile network operators to cement its dominant position in general internet search.

The French Competition Authority has fined Google several times, including a $593 million penalty in 2021 for having disregarded previous injunctions protecting the rights of newspaper publishers. That same year, the agency fined Google $267 million for abusing its dominant position in the online advertising market.

The Italian Competition Authority fined Google $121 million for preventing Enel X Italia from developing an Android version of an app for users of electric vehicles. The agency is conducting a broader investigation of the company.

The Competition Commission of India has fined Google a total of nearly $300 million for abusing its dominant position in online general web search and web search advertising services and for anti-competitive practices in relation to its Play Store policies and in the market for Android devices.

The Korea Fair Trade Commission has fined Google a total of about $200 million for blocking competing mobile operating systems from entering the market and for undermining fair competition in the market for mobile games.

Even the Russian Anti-Monopoly Service has gotten in on the act. In 2022 it fined the company $21 million for abusing its dominant position in the video hosting market. When Google failed to pay that fine, the agency increased the penalty by $47 million.

Unless it gets overturned on appeal, the U.S. decision against Google is likely to have more significant consequences–both monetary and structural–than the foreign cases. It is also being regarded as an indicator of how things may go in the antitrust lawsuits pending against other tech giants such as Amazon, Apple and Meta as well as another case against Google concerning online advertising.

Google has come a long way since it presented itself as an upstart company with a Don’t Be Evil motto. It and the rest of Big Tech accumulated tremendous wealth and power. Maybe now they will be cut down to size.

The U.S. and foreign cases discussed above and much more will be contained in the forthcoming Violation Tracker Global.