Judges at the EU’s lower court rejected a €1.06 billion fine the European Commission slapped on U.S. chipmaker Intel almost 13 years ago on charges of abusing its market dominance and deploying a strategy to exclude a competitor from the market.
The EU General Court said Wednesday that “it annuls in its entirety the article of the contested decision which imposes on Intel a fine of €1.06 billion in respect of the infringement found.”
In 2009, the European Commission’s competition arm, then led by Neelie Kroes, fined the U.S. firm for abusing its dominance in the market for x86 processors, between October 2002 and December 2007. The company engaged in illegal anticompetitive practices to exclude its main rival at the time, the Commission said, by offering illegal rebates and payments to computer makers and retailers not to use products produced by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
“The Commission’s analysis is incomplete and does not make it possible to establish to the requisite legal standard that the rebates at issue were capable of having, or likely to have, anticompetitive effects,” the court said.
The decision comes at the end of a long legal saga. The EU’s lower court in 2014 dismissed the U.S. chipmaker’s appeal. That decision was overruled by the European Court of Justice, which, in a 2017 judgment, referred the case back to the General Court to examine Intel’s arguments.
The Commission and Intel didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
https://ift.tt/eA8V8J January 26, 2022 at 04:34PM
Pietro Lombardi