Euro Car Parks Limited v Competition & Markets Authority

This High Court decision was about publication risk, not the final legality of the CMA's penalty. Euro Car Parks wanted an urgent order stopping the CMA from publishing a Final Enforcement Notice that named the company while its appeal and anonymity application were still pending.

The court refused. It held that there was a strong public interest in the CMA publishing regulatory decisions, including the identity of the business involved, and that the company had not shown the exceptional circumstances needed to justify interim restraint.

For most businesses, the useful lesson is procedural. If a regulator can publish an enforcement notice, the fight about publication may move faster than the fight about whether the underlying decision is right or wrong.

The commercial background was straightforward. The CMA was using its consumer protection powers and served an information notice on Euro Car Parks on 24 July 2025. The notice required a response by 4 September 2025.

The company did not respond in time. Its explanation was that it genuinely believed the CMA's email was a phishing attempt. That missed deadline triggered enforcement action.

On 21 October 2025, the CMA issued a Provisional Enforcement Notice. It proposed a fixed penalty of £473,000 and a daily penalty of £11,000 until the requested information was provided. By the time the Final Enforcement Notice was issued on 10 December 2025, the company had responded, so the daily penalty was not imposed, but the fixed penalty remained.

The company then challenged the notice in more than one way. It filed complaints within the CMA, but those complaints were rejected. It also brought a statutory appeal on 6 January 2026, arguing that the Final Enforcement Notice was based on an error of fact, was wrong in law and was unreasonable.

Alongside the appeal, the company applied for a withholding order under CPR 39.2 so that its name would not appear publicly in the appeal proceedings until the appeal was finally decided. The immediate problem was that the CMA intended to publish the Final Enforcement Notice on 13 February 2026.

Euro Car Parks said publication would make any later anonymity order pointless because once the company was publicly identified, that loss of anonymity could not be reversed. Its managing director also said that publicity could expose her and her family to harassment, intimidation and threats.

The judge was not deciding whether the penalty should ultimately stand. The immediate question was whether to grant an urgent interim injunction stopping the CMA from publishing the Final Enforcement Notice in unredacted form.

That meant applying the rules on prior restraint of publication, including section 12 of the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Article 10 right to freedom of expression. The court also had to consider open justice and the public interest in receiving information that a public authority is entitled to publish.

A key point in the judgment was procedural. The company argued that publication should be held back because it had a live application to withhold its name in the appeal proceedings. But the court said it was important to separate the issues properly.

The appeal itself was a statutory appeal against the Final Enforcement Notice. The court's powers on that appeal were to quash, vary or uphold the CMA's decision. The appeal was not, in itself, a route for ordering that the notice be published only in redacted form.

The judge also noted the CMA's argument that if there were a legal basis to constrain the exercise of its publication power, that should be by judicial review. The judgment did not finally determine that point, but it did make clear that the company's withholding application did not directly seek to restrain publication of the Final Enforcement Notice.

So the court had to ask a narrower question. Had the company shown a sufficient basis for the court to restrain publication now, despite the CMA's statutory power to publish and the strong public interest in transparency?

Mrs Justice Eady refused the injunction. The court accepted that the CMA had a statutory power to publish the Final Enforcement Notice and that there was a strong public interest in publication in unredacted form.

The judgment gave several reasons for that public interest. The CMA's information-gathering powers are important to its ability to enforce consumer protection law. Publishing Final Enforcement Notices shows the consequences of non-compliance and helps deter others from ignoring information notices.

The court also accepted the CMA's point that transparency is not just about naming businesses that have been subject to action. It is also about fairness. If the notice referred only to an unnamed parking operator, other parking operators might be suspected. Naming the actual business can therefore be part of transparent and fair publication.

The company relied heavily on the evidence of its managing director, who described abuse, threats, trolling, press attention and fears of physical reprisals affecting her and her family. The judge proceeded on the basis that these concerns were genuinely held.

Even so, the evidence did not meet the required standard. The court said there was no corroborating material to explain the context or support the allegations. The evidence was also too unspecific. It referred to abuse over the years and press intimidation in the past, but did not explain clearly when events happened, why they happened or why publication of this particular notice would cause them to happen again.

The judge also considered the nature of the notice itself. This was an administrative penalty for failure to respond to an information notice. It was not a finding that the company had committed a substantive breach of consumer protection law. The court found it hard to see why publication of that kind of notice would trigger the sort of reaction the company feared.

The company also argued that a short-lived injunction should be granted to allow fuller consideration of the anonymity issue. The court rejected that too. The judge noted that the evidential weaknesses had already been identified during the complaint process, so the company had already had an opportunity to provide more detail and support.

The result was that publication was not restrained and the CMA was free to publish the Final Enforcement Notice in unredacted form.

The practical lesson is not about parking. It is about regulator process, publication risk and evidence. If your business receives a formal information notice, the safest assumption is that a missed deadline can become both an enforcement problem and a publicity problem.

This case also shows that courts draw a clear line between reputational concern and exceptional harm. A business may honestly fear bad press, customer complaints, client concern or online hostility. But if it wants the court to stop a regulator publishing a notice, it will usually need much more than that.

You should also avoid assuming that anonymity in court proceedings will solve the publication issue. The judgment makes clear that keeping names out of appeal proceedings is not the same as obtaining an order that stops the regulator publishing its own notice.

Another important point is that publication may still happen even if the underlying decision is being challenged. The court accepted that the public may have a legitimate interest in knowing that a regulator made a decision, even if that decision is later overturned on appeal.

For a business owner, the real takeaway is to act early. Once a matter has moved to a Final Enforcement Notice, the room for controlling publicity may be much narrower than many businesses expect.

For most businesses, the best protection is good internal handling of regulator contact. This case started with a missed information notice deadline. That single failure created the conditions for a substantial penalty and a later fight about publication.

If your business deals with consumers, pricing, terms, charges, complaints or marketing, make sure someone is responsible for triaging regulator correspondence. Emails that look suspicious should be checked quickly, not ignored. If the communication is genuine, the business should respond within time or seek an extension.

If you later need to ask a court for anonymity or temporary restraint, evidence quality matters. The court in this case was not persuaded by broad assertions without supporting material. If you say publication creates a real risk to individuals, you should expect the court to look for detail, context and corroboration.

That can include dates, examples, supporting documents, prior reports, correspondence, or other material that shows the feared harm is real and linked to the publication in question. The court's criticism here was not that personal safety concerns can never matter. It was that the evidence did not show enough to outweigh the strong public interest in publication.

Businesses should also keep separate files for regulator notices, response deadlines, verification steps, extension requests and internal sign-off. If a dispute later reaches court, those records can matter both on the merits and on any argument about fairness, urgency or the reason for non-compliance.

The judgment was handed down on 11 February 2026. It dealt with an urgent interim injunction application only. It did not finally determine the statutory appeal against the Final Enforcement Notice.

That matters because businesses should not read the case as deciding whether the £473,000 penalty was ultimately right. The decision is about the court's reluctance to restrain publication by a public regulator without exceptional circumstances and strong evidence.