Il Tar of Lazio cancels the maxi-fines of 228 million overall than in January 2020 the Antitrust imposed on Fastweb, Tim, Vodafone and WindTre. At the heart of the matter, an anti-competitive understanding on the price change linked to the return to monthly billing instead of 28 days. The administrative judges therefore accepted the appeals presented by the telephone companies, but the story is not over: the last step will be the appeal to the Council of State which the Antitrust will certainly want to request.
The story begins in 2015, when Tim, Vodafone and WindTre decide to change the renewal period (and therefore billing) of top-up offers for mobile telephony, reducing it from one month to four weeks, or 28 days. In this way, companies manage to get an extra payment every year. Subsequently, the trick was also adopted by Fastweb, after which all the companies also extended it to fixed telephony.
At that point he intervenes the Agcom, establishing that the time unit for renewal and billing of fixed network contracts should be one month and that, for mobile telephony, it could not be less than 28 days. According to the Authority, the reduction of the billing period was a non-transparent decision, as it was aimed at raise tariffs so that consumers do not notice.
When the companies do not comply with the Agcom provision, the Authority issues the first sanctions and above all the Antitrust opens an investigation procedure to verify the existence of an agreement restricting competition. With a precautionary deed, Tim, Vodafone, WindTre and Fastweb are required to suspend the implementation of the agreement, pending the proceedings. Subsequently, the Antitrust sanctions arrive for "an anti-competitive agreement relating to the repricing carried out in the return to monthly billing": almost 15 million euros to Fastweb, 114 million to Telecom, 60 million to Vodafone and 39 million to Wind. The Market Authority says in a release that "the four telephone operators have coordinated their commercial strategies relating to the transition from four-weekly billing (28 days) to monthly billing, with the maintenance of the percentage increase of 8,6%".
The three companies then present appeal to the Tar, which accepts it. "The contested resolution - reads one of the sentences - presents an initial profile of illogicality and evident lack of investigation where it infers and enhances the alleged secrecy of the agreement exclusively on the basis of a document that is completely unusable, being outside the perimeter timing of the alleged concerted practice, as defined by the Authority itself: so that the secrecy of the agreement is completely unproven ... Therefore, in the opinion of the Board, a further profile of a lack of preliminary investigation emerges, given that the alleged agreement can be reconstructed from a single document, namely the exchange of emails within Fastweb dated 14 November 2017".
The reaction of the consumer associations was immediate: "The Tar continues to support the delaying policy of the telephone companies - writes theUnione Nazionale Consumatori – who climb walls and mirrors in search of legal quibbles just to be able to do their thing in defiance of what the Authorities have decided: Agcom and Antitrust. A decision that leaves us dismayed.
Meanwhile, the customers of the companies are still waiting for the refunds for money wrongfully embezzled with 28-day bills, on which the Council of State has already expressed itself by rejecting the appeals of the telephone companies. There is talk of hundreds of millions of euros to be allocated to around 10 million users. And the Tar has not changed the point. The question therefore remains open and, once again, the final decision is entrusted to the Council of State.
