FAS started the case against Rostelecom

The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) started the case against Rostelecom, suspecting the state operator in imposition to other unprofitable conditions of the contract, the Vedomosti newspaper writes with reference to the message of the FAS.

The reason for the proceedings was the statement of Megafon: the operator accused Rostelecom of limiting the possibility of missing traffic between zone telephone networks of one numbering zone. According to the statement, Rostelecom demanded that the subscribers of operators annexed to Megafon should be in an explicit form to use the services of the intra -zone telephone communication of Rostelecom.

Last November, the FAS warned Rostelecom about the need to exclude this condition from the ATEX Plus operators on December 23 on December 23, the company, Telemir, as well as Megafon’s daughter, Netbynet, but the company ignored this requirement, which became the reason for initiating the case.

According to the head of the Megafon practice on antimonopoly law and the procurement of Dmitry Abramov, Rostelecom abuses his dominant position, not allowing to pass traffic from attached operators. In this regard, Megafon itself cannot provide intrazone telephone services to subscribers of the operators attached to it.

As the partner of the Law Firm Orient Partners, Alexander Karpukhin, actually demanded from the “megaphone” to pass traffic through his networks to provide written refusals from Rostelecom’s services from the final subscribers. Rostelecom refused to provide its channels to pass the Megafon traffic from local operators with which Megafon concluded joining agreements, demanding consent to the transition to Megafon of all end subscribers of such operators.

According to Karpukhin, if Rostelecom is recognized as a violator, he may face a working fine of up to 15% of the revenue in the corresponding market. At the same time, Vedomosti notes that in 2016, the services for joining and passing traffic (excluding data transfer) brought 30.4 billion rubles, or 7.5% of total revenue.

Taras Hizhnyak, senior BMS Law Firm Lawyer, believes that the management of the state operator can also be fined from 20 to 50 thousand rubles or earn disqualification for up to three years. According to the lawyer, the FAS most likely pleads the company guilty of violating the law on the protection of competition.