MOSCOW, November 23 (RAPSI) – The Moscow Commercial Court brought Yandex into a lawsuit filed by Google Inc. against Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) over a 500,000 ruble ($8,000) fine as a third party, court ruling read on Wednesday.
Hearings in the case are set for December 6.
On November 2, FAS held Google Inc. and Google Ireland Limited liable for their failure to comply with the regulator’s order and fined the companies 500,000 rubles (about $8,000) each.
Date of hearings in Google Ireland Limited’s lawsuit against FAS has not been set yet.
Yet in September, Igor Artemyev, the Head of FAS, stated that the agency was ready to fine Google every two weeks if the company failed to comply with the antimonopoly watchdog’s orders.
“In case we see the process is dragged out, we will meet every two weeks to impose new fines on them for failing to comply with the order,” he said. “It will continue until the final victory [is achieved - ed.] and final court judgement [is passed - ed.],” according to Artemyev.
The deadline for Google to comply with the FAS order requiring the company to remedy the violation by refraining from installation of its products on mobile devices and allowing installation of applications developed by third parties expired on August 29. FAS has dismissed Google’s petition to extend this term.
On August 17, the Ninth Commercial Court of Appeals dismissed an appeal filed by Google against a ruling that the U.S. company had broken Russian anti-monopoly legislation by abusing its dominance on the Russian market of mobile applications.
In early August, FAS announced that it had fined Google 438 million rubles ($6.7 million) for violating administrative legislation.
On September 18, 2015, the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) found Google guilty of violating the legislation.
On March 15, 2016, the Moscow Commercial Court dismissed Google’s petition requesting to abolish the FAS decision and order issued in September 2015, which stated that the company had violated the Federal Law on Protection of Competition and accused it of abuse of dominance on the market of preinstalled applications in the Android operating system.
