A French court handed a record penalty of 4 million euros ($4.5 million) on Amazon.com Inc for introducing clauses in its contract with third-party vendors which came to be abusing conditions for retailers that sells on its platform, reported Reuters citing a Tuesday report by French website Nextinpact.
In its written comments to Reuters on the court’s decision, Amazon said that ruling was made upon a specific number of clauses, most of which were already been updated by it earlier this year.
But the Paris commercial court also ordered the online retail giant to remove abusive clauses from its contracts with third-party vendors and gave the company a time period of six month to comply with that order, failing to do so will result in additional per day fine of 10,000 euros.
The case was brought to court by the General Directorate for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control, a part of French Finance Ministry, in December 2017 after conducting a two-year long investigation into the matter. Though the agency requested the court a fine of 10 million euros but welcomed the court’s verdict.
Loic Tanguy at French consumer fraud watchdog said that called the news very good, and added that although the penalty is of record amount for practicing abusive trading conditions, but besides its record size, most of the clauses agency had put forward have now been recognized as illegal by the court.
However, findings of the consumer fraud watchdog implied that the online retail platform was involved in imposing an unfair relationship with the retailers who wanted to sell their products on the platform, Tanguy said.
The Online retail giant said that developing and providing best possible service to its sales partners as well as customers will remain the main point of focus of the company, as it always was.
