Russian Watchdog Says MegaFon Violated Antitrust Laws
MOSCOW, Oct 19 (Prime-Tass) -- Russia's Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) has found that Russia?s third largest mobile operator MegaFon violated antitrust legislation by setting higher tariffs for incoming calls from networks of some mobile operators, a spokesperson with the service told Prime-Tass Thursday.
The regulator also found that Russia's two largest mobile operators, MTS and VimpelCom, had violated antitrust legislation by setting tariffs for calls from other operators' networks higher than tariffs for calls within the Big Three, the spokesperson said, adding that the service had decided to close the case against MTS and VimpelCom as the two operators agreed to set equal tariffs for all operators.
No other information was provided.
MegaFon plans to appeal the FAS' decision as under the current legislation, tariffs of operators not included in the list of dominant operators are not subject to regulation, MegaFon said in a press release.
The case against Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), VimpelCom and MegaFon, was initiated in mid-August.
The FAS probe into the mobile operators? operations found that the companies had agreed to set an inter-operator fee of 0.95 rubles per minute for incoming calls among themselves, while charging other operators 1.1 rubles per minute, the FAS said earlier. The move would force smaller mobile operators to overhaul their tariffs and forgo cheaper tariff plans, the regulator said, adding that alleged collusion violated the country's competition law.
MTS, VimpelCom and MegaFon reportedly agreed to set the connection charges in early July as a way of minimizing their losses from the Calling Party Pays (CPP) principle, which was introduced in Russia on July 1.
The agreement was denounced by Association-800, a group of Russian regional mobile operators in mid-July.
VimpelCom said in September that it was ready to offer a temporary discount to minor operators until December 31.
A source in Association-800 said that MTS had agreed to lower its tariff for minor operators in July-September, Kommersant business daily reported Thursday.
As of September 30, the three largest operators accounted for about 86% of the Russian mobile telephone market, according to Advanced Communications & Media (AC&M).
(26.9288 rubles - U.S. $1)
End"
Posted to the site on 19th October 2006
