Facebook owner Meta has been fined £1.5m by UK regulators over more breaches relating to its takeover of animated images platform Giphy.
The Competition & Markets Authority said Meta had failed to alert it in advance about the departure of key staff, in contravention of an initial enforcement order.
Meta was last November ordered to sell Giphy, which it bought for a reported $400m in May 2020, after the CMA said remedies offered by the US company resolve concerns over the impact on digital advertising. Meta is appealing the ruling.
The CMA described the latest breach as a “serious and particularly flagrant nature of Meta’s failure to comply” with rules it set to make sure the two firms were still competing with each other, and were not integrating while the deal was investigated the deal.
Meta was fined £50.5m last October last year after limiting the scope of compliance reports.
