The European Commission (EC) has announced a €500 million fine for Apple and another €200 million for Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) for violating the European Digital Markets Act (DMA), which came into force in March 2024. The sanctions come amid a trade war between the United States and the rest of the world.

It has been more than a week since the Department of Home Affairs started the procedure to pay back the fines given between March 14 and June 21, 2020, for covid restrictions violations. A total of 24,000 fines were paid, and they can now be claimed back after the Constitutional Court overturned the first lockdown. But beyond this, penalties for non-compliance with the anti-covid measures have continued and in this case the Health Department has already issued almost 195,000 fines since June 2020. The most common fine, which accounts for 41% of those that have been processed in the last year and a half, is for not wearing a mask. Twenty percent are for failure to comply with a local lockdown order and 14% for breaking a curfew.

The Catalan Government plans to pay back €4.6m corresponding to the 24,295 fines handed out for breaking restrictions during the first lockdown. The Department of the Home Affairs will pay back once affected citizens fill out a form which is expected to be made available before Christmas. The operation still needs to be approved by the legal department, and the authorities have ruled out paying any interest on the sums, although experts are not certain this would be legal. The method chosen to return the fines paid (just 17% of those given) tries to respond to one of the consequences of the Constitutional Court's July ruling which declared the state alarm that allowed the lockdown void.

The first weekend in which travelling inside Catalonia was allowed as long as you stuck to your cohabitation bubble has finished with twice as many fines as last weekend for breaking travel restrictions. Between the 12th and the 14th of March, about 600 fines were handed out; between the 19th and the 21st of March the number jumped to about 1.100, according to police data. While these penalties increased, the fines breaking curfew and restrictions on the hospitality industry decreased. This may simply indicate that figures depend on which area the police focus on.

One year after the pandemic, the management of fines for non-compliance with the measures against covid remains a dead end in Catalonia. If two months ago the ARA explained that until mid-January the Department of Home Affairs had collected 5% of the penalties for the first state of alarm - those imposed between March and June last year - what has followed is insignificant. The Health Department, which since the end of June has taken over the management of complaints for breaching the restrictions, has only collected 150 fines, 0.16% of those received since the summer and up to mid-February. In this period, the department has processed less than 2% of the penalties - 1,635 - of the 92,032 that it has received.