Delivery Hero and Glovo: The Competition They Agreed to Remove

The Delivery Hero and Glovo whistleblower antitrust case ended in €329 million in European Commission fines for no-poach arrangements, sensitive-information exchange and geographic market allocation. The food delivery companies admitted the conduct. Information from an anonymous whistleblower tool and a national competition authority contributed to the inquiry.

The Commission’s June 2, 2025 settlement announcement covered conduct from July 2018 through July 2022.

No-Poach and Market Allocation Reach Different Parts of the Business

Delivery Hero and Glovo admitted restraints on hiring alongside information exchange and geographic allocation. Those practices concern both the people a business needs and the markets it serves.

A no-poach arrangement restricts competition for employees. The person affected may experience it as a recruiting approach that never arrives or a job discussion that stops. Workers can lose access to better job opportunities without knowing their employers agreed to stop competing for them.

Geographic allocation concerns where rivals agree to leave each other room. A business can give up competition by agreeing to stay away from a territory. The customer then loses the offer that rival might otherwise have made. An employee may know which manager issued the hiring or market instruction and how staff put it into practice, a decision-to-action connection also illustrated by the poster-pricing case.

For sensitive-information exchange, the practical questions concern what a rival learned, who supplied it and how it entered commercial decisions. We examine those connections with insiders because an agreement becomes tangible in the instructions people carry out.

What No-Poach Looks Like Inside a Company

The Apple-Google complaint example describes a recruiting restriction embedded in company lists and hiring instructions, a separate comparison for Delivery Hero and Glovo’s admitted conduct.

The complaint described cold calling as reaching a person who had not applied for the opening. It explained why technology companies used it even when they already received many applications: employees at rival firms had the specialized skills needed for the job. The alleged agreement shut down that form of competition.

The technical-recruiting case provides a separate example of restrictions alleged to lack geographic, job-function, product-group or time limits.

The Justice Department also alleged that Apple complained about Google’s recruiting efforts and that Google investigated and reported back. That makes the evidence concrete: the restriction, the recruiter instructions and the communications enforcing it. An employee could see a canceled approach. A recruiting manager could know why it was canceled.

The parallel helps explain the labor side of Delivery Hero and Glovo’s admitted conduct. Recruitment decisions can reveal an agreement just as clearly as sales decisions. A hiring manual or instruction to stop approaching a rival’s employees deserves the same attention as a message assigning customers or territory.

How Did the European Commission Find the Conduct?

The Commission credited information from a national competition authority and its anonymous whistleblower tool in the Delivery Hero and Glovo inquiry. The whistleblower lead formed part of a wider investigative effort. That matters to an insider who understands a particular instruction or conversation without seeing every part of the arrangement.

Applied here, that distinction explains why both sources of information deserve attention. An authority can bring a wider view of the market. Someone inside a business may understand the instruction behind a decision that looks ordinary from outside. We look for the connection between that knowledge and what the companies actually did: a message, an instruction and its effect on hiring or commercial activity.

Delivery Hero and Glovo’s Separate Fines

The Commission imposed an administrative fine of €223,285,000 on Delivery Hero SE, compared with €105,732,000 on Glovoapp23 SA. Both amounts reflected a 10% settlement reduction.

What Does the Anonymous Tool Mean for a Whistleblower?

The Delivery Hero and Glovo anonymous-tool lead has no publicly disclosed reporter award. The Commission credited the channel’s contribution to the inquiry.

For someone with comparable knowledge, the useful connection is between the agreement and its implementation. Recruiting restrictions, communications with a rival and decisions about territory can show different parts of that connection. You may know why a candidate was dropped, why information crossed company lines or why an opportunity was left to another business. We work through what that knowledge means for your case, including any questions about anonymity.

What Does This Mean for a U.S. Whistleblower Case?

For a U.S. antitrust whistleblower case, we examine how the conduct reached the United States and affected the U.S. Postal Service under the rewards program’s May 2025 agreement. Our whistleblower experts work through that connection with you.

Where conduct also involves false claims for government money, we examine the potential for a False Claims Act case. A whistleblower case under the False Claims Act can pay 15% to 30% of what the government recovers. Our whistleblower experts bring in whistleblower lawyers to address any government-claims issues raised by the delivery business.

You Know Why the Business Stepped Aside

Bring our whistleblower experts the Delivery Hero or Glovo instruction that changed hiring, shared information or assigned a market.