Rome: A merger control fine of 44 million dollars on Kingspan has shown that the European Commission will punish companies that give it false or incomplete information during a review, even when the deal never closes. According to a client alert from the law firm Morrison Foerster dated 5 November 2026, the Commission took the decision on 8 October 2026.
Kingspan abandoned its planned purchase of Trimo in April 2022, yet the Commission kept examining what the company had told it. Investigators found four infringements, covering market data, bidding records, the involvement of board members in strategic matters and acquisitions, and research and development activities. The Commission concluded that Kingspan misrepresented facts, wrongly said some documents did not exist and claimed it could not supply information that was available.
The merger control fine also rests on a low legal bar. The firm points out that negligence alone is enough to establish an infringement. That standard matters because it removes the need to prove intent. The alert describes Kingspan as only the fourth such case under the EU Merger Regulation since 2004, after earlier fines on Facebook, General Electric and Merck.
A second case is moving in the same direction. On 19 October 2026 the Commission sent KKR a Statement of Objections over its 2024 acquisition of NetCo, the Telecom Italia fixed-line network assets that include FiberCop. The Commission cleared that deal unconditionally in May 2024, relying on KKR’s statement that FiberCop’s long-term wholesale agreements could not be changed unilaterally.
After complaints that FiberCop later raised prices under those agreements, the Commission provisionally found that KKR supplied incorrect or misleading information, at least negligently. A merger control fine in that case could reach 1 percent of the group’s worldwide annual turnover, and the Commission may also revoke the clearance decision. A statement of objections is not a final ruling, and no deadline for a decision has been published.
For multinational groups, the practical lesson is that exposure sits at group level. The Commission can request information and documents held outside the EU, and fines can be calculated on worldwide turnover rather than European revenue alone. Companies with many subsidiaries therefore need one reliable process for checking every answer given to Brussels.
Readers should note that the alert does not say whether Kingspan will appeal, and it cites no article numbers for the fining powers. The Commission’s own decision text will give those details.
The signal for 2026 is clear enough, and companies should read the merger control fine as a warning about process, not only about outcomes. If the KKR case ends in a second penalty, the merger control fine will look less like a rare accident and more like a standing enforcement tool, and legal teams will treat accuracy in notification forms as seriously as the substance of the deal.
