o Royal Mail has been fined £40 million by the French authorities for the participation in an illegal 20-company price-fixing cartel by its parcel subsidiary GLS.

The Autorite de la Concurrence found that secret and unrecorded talks on rigged pricing of parcel services had taken place amongst some members of the powerful French trade association Union des Enterprises de Transport et de Logistics de France (TLF) at TLF meetings between 2004 and 2010. Also fined were TLF members Fedex, fined £12 million, TNT, fined £42 million and DHL, fined £59 million. A total of £489 million in fines was levied on the cartel.

o Energy company npower has been censured by industry regulator Ofgem for billing and complaint handling failures, and has been forced to pay £26 million as a customer redress package. The money will be given to some of npower’s worst-affected customers, and to charity.

Ofgem revealed that npower’s flawed billing procedures between September 2013 and December 2014 generated more than 2 million complaints, which were not dealt with within a reasonable timeframe, and affected more than 500,000 npower customers, with some being dealt with aggressively by npower over disputed payments.