Russian antitrust to fine Google 1 mln rbl if sees no fixing by Nov 28

MOSCOW, Nov 23 (PRIME) -- Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service will hit Google with one more fine of 1 million rubles if the company does not mend its breaches on the local market of mobile applications by November 28, the authority’s Director Igor Artemyev said on Wednesday.

“Now we’re at a stage when after imposing a second fine on them, we may be sure that even after all explanations and a repeated fine they would ignore legal decisions of Russian courts. We’ll file a corresponding suit to force them to obey. Later we’ll make it a criminal case,” Artemyev said.

The service will immediately repeatedly fine Google if it fails to improve by November 28. “It will be about 1 million rubles; it’ll be a small fine for a while,” Artemyev said.

“The thing is that we’ll have recurrence of failures to fulfill the warrant, which makes ground for filing a lawsuit to court on compulsory execution of our order by a court decision. Then we have marshals and so on. Moreover, it’ll be criminal liability.”

In September 2015, the Federal Antimonopoly Service found Google guilty of abusing its dominant position on the local market of preinstalled application stores and forcing Android device manufacturers to install its Google Play in a tie-up with its other programs. The case was opened upon complaint by local Internet giant Yandex.

The authority slapped a fine of 438 million rubles on Google, or 9% of the company’s turnover on the local market of mobile applications in 2014, but the date to pay the penalty expired in August.

On November 2, the watchdog fined Google Inc. and Google Ireland Ltd. 500,000 rubles each for a failure to fix the breaches. The companies are litigating the decision at court with preliminary hearings of one of the fines scheduled for December 6.

(63.6282 rubles – U.S. $1)

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