Apple fined €1.1bn by France over anti-competitive practices

France’s competition authority claims Apple struck deals to keep iPad prices high

Apple has been fined €1.1 billion (£1bn) by antitrust authorities in France, who claim that the company struck deals to maintain high prices.

The regulators say that the company's deals with resellers Tech Data and Ingram Micro obliged them to ‘align' their prices with Apple's own pricing. The deals related to iPads, Macs and Macbooks.

Both Tech Data and Ingram Micro were also fined - €76 million and €63 million respectively.

"Apple and its two wholesalers agreed not to compete with each other and to prevent distributors from competing with each other, thereby sterilising the wholesale market for Apple products," said the head of the French competition authority, the Autorité de la concurrence, Isabelle de Silva.

The large fine comes more than six years after the Authority conducted dawn raids on Apple's offices, following complaints from collapsed French Apple reseller EBizcuss. It had accused Apple of unfair supply practices, favouring its own stores and starving companies like EBizcuss of steady supplies of hardware.

The company has yet to comment on the fine, but it could take its case to the Court of Appeal of Paris and the Court of Cassation.

It's not the first time that French competition authorities have come down hard on one of the US tech giants. In December last year, French authorities slapped Google with a fine of €150 million over what it claimed was anti-competitive practices in the online advertising market.

Apple has also battled with the European Commission over claims that it dodged tax by adopting what has been described a the "double Irish with a Dutch sandwich" accounting method. This structures sales and profits to take advantage of low-tax jurisdictions in the EU, with the resulting profits then funnelled off to tax havens in the Caribbean.