Companies can often slip into behaviour that quickly escalates into becoming anti-competitive and cartel-like, and compliance functions need to be alive to the risk—particularly as regulatory enforcement continues to ramp up, and especially in Europe.

While the European Commission may have had a slow start imposing fines for cartel-like behaviour at the beginning of 2016, the EU’s executive body soon made up for it by the second half of the year.

Neil Hodge is a freelance business journalist and photographer based in Nottingham, United Kingdom. He writes on insurance and risk management, corporate governance, internal audit, compliance, and legal...