The European Commission said on Friday that Temu's owner, PDD Holdings, and its subsidiary WhaleCo Technology may have obstructed an inspection. The inspection was unannounced, ran from 2 to 5 December 2025, and took place at WhaleCo's premises in Dublin. [1]
The charge is about those four days. It is not about what the inspectors were looking for.
That distinction is the entire story, and it is worth holding onto, because obstructing a regulator is a separate offence from whatever the regulator came to investigate. Under the Foreign Subsidies Regulation, a company being inspected owes the Commission active cooperation as a standalone duty. The Commission's preliminary finding is that "Temu has infringed its duty to actively cooperate on multiple aspects related to the conduct of the inspection," which if confirmed would breach Article 14 of the FSR. [1]
What was allegedly not handed over is unglamorous and specific: information on the organisation and management of Temu's activities in the EU, the IT tools and systems the company uses for those activities, and specific books and records. The Commission's own characterisation of those requests is the load-bearing sentence in the release. "Such requests are customary in a competition investigation and are typically made at the early stages of the inspection," it says. Not providing them "prevented the Commission from reviewing sources of information that could be relevant for its investigation." [1]
The exposure is defined. Article 17(1) of the FSR lets the Commission fine a company that refuses to submit to an inspection or that produces requested books and records in incomplete form. Before it can do that it must send a Statement of Grounds, after which the company may request access to the Commission's file and file observations. If the Commission then concludes there is sufficient evidence of an infringement, it can impose "a fine not exceeding 1% of the total turnover in the preceding business year." [1] The Commission's own text does not say whose turnover that ceiling attaches to; Anadolu Agency reported it as PDD Holdings'. [4] The matter sits in the public case register as FS.100186.AP. [1]
Temu has answered, and the answer is a denial. The company says it "cooperated fully and complied with all the requests the commission made during the inspection" and that it will analyse the Commission's claim. It has categorically denied receiving unfair foreign subsidies, saying it "generates sustained cash flows from its own operating activities that are sufficient to fund Temu's operations in the EU." [2] No spokesperson is named in the statement Euronews carried. Nothing in the record supports describing Temu as having refused to comment.
Two things this matter is not, both of which are easy to get wrong. It is not a Digital Services Act case, even though Temu has one of those running alongside it: on 28 May the Commission fined the company 200 million euros for failing to properly assess the systemic risk of illegal products on its platform, after mystery shopping found that a very high proportion of sampled chargers failed basic safety tests, and gave Temu until 28 August 2026 to file an action plan under Article 75 of the DSA. [3] Different regulation, different obligation, different case.
It is also not an Irish enforcement action. No Irish authority appears anywhere in it. Ireland is simply where WhaleCo keeps premises, which is where inspectors went in December.
The subsidies investigation that prompted all of this continues. The Commission is explicit that these proceedings "concern only the behaviour of Temu during the inspection conducted in December 2025" and are without prejudice to the main preliminary investigation into whether the company received distortive foreign subsidies, which runs in parallel. It is equally explicit that sending a Statement of Grounds "does not prejudge the outcome of the investigation." [1] Temu has been charged with nothing that has been proved, and it now gets to argue.
Eight months passed between the raid and the charge. The subsidies question that sent inspectors to Dublin is still open, and the organisational charts, system documentation and books they asked for on the first morning are still, on the Commission's account, unseen. A procedural infringement is a small thing to write about. It is not a small thing to be on the receiving end of, because it is what the enforcement system does when it notices it has been kept outside.
