Thursday, May 16, 2024

Vogon Today

Selected News from the Galaxy

StartMag

Because the Tar scraps the fine to Tim, Vodafone, WindTre and Fastweb. Consumers snort

3 years ago babelfish

Because the Tar scraps the fine to Tim, Vodafone, WindTre and Fastweb. Consumers snort

The TAR canceled the 228 million euro fine to Fastweb, Tim, Vodafone and WindTre for 28-day billing. The court ruling and the reaction of consumer associations

Fastweb, Tim, Vodafone and WindTre can save a total of 228 million euros for the fine received by the Agcm last year.

In fact, the maxi sanctions imposed in January 2020 by the Antitrust on Fastweb, Tim, Vodafone and WindTre for an anti-competitive agreement relating to the repricing carried out in the return to monthly invoicing, as reported by Ansa, were canceled.

This was decided by the Lazio TAR with four sentences with which it accepted the appeals proposed by the telephone companies to challenge the provision with which on 11 April 2018 the Authority confirmed the provisional precautionary measures adopted the month before, up to to the provision of January 28, 2020 with which the restrictive agreement was ascertained and the penalties imposed.

Complex facts come to the scrutiny of the judges and reconstructed in the sentences. The beginning is in 2015, when Tim, Vodafone, WindTre and Fastweb changed the renewal and billing period of the rechargeable mobile phone offers, taking it from a monthly to a four-week period.

All the details.

WHAT THE ANTITRUST HAD ESTABLISHED

According to what was ascertained by the Antitrust Authority, the four telephone companies had "coordinated their commercial strategies relating to the transition fromfour-weekly (28 days) to monthly billing , with the maintenance of the 8.6% percentage increase", explained the Authority.

The effects of the four-party agreement, or "cartel", as defined by the Antitrust, however, were not fully applied, thanks to the prompt intervention of the Authority, which imposed, from the beginning of the procedure, measures precautionary measures that blocked tariff increases.

THE ROLE OF AGCOM

Agcom intervened with resolution 121/17 / CONS of March 15, 2017, establishing that the time unit for the renewal frequency and for the billing of fixed network contracts should be the month and that, for mobile telephony, not could be less than 28 days.

WHAT FASTWEB, TIM, VODAFONE AND WINDTRE HAD DECIDED

The operators did not comply with the prescriptions and turned to the TAR.

Failure to adapt to the monthly billing method however led to the initiation of sanctioning proceedings, and subsequently the Authority initiated an investigation procedure to ascertain the existence of an agreement restricting competition. A precautionary measure was adopted to order Tim, Vodafone, WindTre and Fastweb to suspend, pending the proceedings, the implementation of the agreement.

THE FINANCIAL PENALTIES IMPOSED BY THE ANTITRUST

Furthermore, the confirmation of the provisional precautionary measure was followed by the sanctioning measure: 14,756,250 euros to Fastweb; 114,398,325 euros to Telecom; 59,970,351 euros to Vodafone and 38,973,750 euros to Wind) disputed before the Tar.

WHAT THE TAR HAS ESTABLISHED

"The contested resolution – reads one of the sentences – presents a first profile of illogicality and an evident lack of investigation where it deduces and values ​​the alleged secrecy of the agreement exclusively on the basis of a document" which is "completely unusable, being external to the temporal perimeter of carrying out the alleged concerted practice, as defined by the Authority itself: so that the secrecy of the agreement is completely unproven ".

In the opinion of the TAR, the considerations collected "at most, would lead to the identification of an incorrect practice pursuant to the Consumer Code, whose harmful effects are manifested to the detriment of consumers but which are not suitable to support the existence of a a concerted practice between operators to keep the increase firm for the express purpose of avoiding the outflow of customers to the competition ".

BECAUSE THE PROVISION OF THE AGCM IS VOID

In essence, "the Provision lacks circumstantial, serious, precise and concordant elements, such as to outline a sufficiently clear picture"; while the contract was provided with "a plausible explanation of the reconstructed meetings and exchanges of information, an alternative to that reconstructed by the Agcm".

Finally, the reconstruction of the Authority, then, "does not provide adequate preliminary evidence to contrast the thesis of the Parties", whose explanation "in the absence of other more direct and specific exogenous elements, appears plausible and, therefore, an alternative to that followed by the Agcm, aimed at recognizing an anti-competitive agreement ".

THE REACTION OF CONSUMER ASSOCIATIONS

A shame! It is well known that justice does not work in this country, but now it has hit rock bottom ”. This was stated in a note by Massimiliano Dona, president of the National Consumers Union, commenting on the decision of the Lazio TAR which canceled the maxi penalties for a total of 228 million euros imposed in January 2020 by the Antitrust on Fastweb, Tim, Vodafone and WindTre. “The TAR – underlines Dona – continues to indulge the delaying policy of telephone companies, which climb walls and mirrors in search of legal quibbles in order to be able to do their own thing in spite of what the Authorities have decided: Agcom and Antitrust. A decision that leaves us dismayed! " concludes Dona.

“The Lazio TAR comes to the aid of telephone operators and considers it a 'case' that all together have implemented maneuvers to avoid the Antitrust sanctions. At the Council of State, things will change, but above all the obligation remains for telephone companies to return 350 million euros to 12 million users, as ordered by Agcom, for the illegal practice of 28-day bills ”. This is the comment made by Codacons on today's decision of the administrative judges to cancel the sanction of 228 million euros imposed by the Antitrust on telephone operators.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/primo-piano/perche-il-tar-boccia-agcom-su-tim-vodafone-windtre-e-fastweb/ on Mon, 12 Jul 2021 14:41:52 +0000.