Nine years of litigation ends in Paris Court
Bouygues Telecom has conceded that it may have to pay out damages of €308 million ($328 million) to rival Free Mobile in the short term, following a February 2023 Paris Commercial Court ruling, reports TeleGeography’s Comms Update. Bouygues had taken the matter to the First President of the Paris Court of Appeal, but an order dated 5 April 2023 dismissed Bouygues’ request to stop the immediate execution of the decision, as ‘there was no evidence that it was impossible to enforce the ruling’.
The litigation started in 2014, when Free Mobile opened legal proceedings against its main competitors Orange and Bouygues Telecom (but not the challenger mobile operator Iliad) over the pair’s handset subsidy offerings, which it claimed would bind customers into a long-term commitment with a single operator. It initially sought damages worth €1.5 billion from the two companies. The Paris Commercial Court’s February 2023 ruling stated that there must be ‘immediate execution of the judgement’, which Bouygues Telecom believes is incorrect given the proceedings were initiated before 1 January 2020. Bouygues Telecom said that it ‘disputes this ruling in the strongest possible terms and considers that its bundled offers are legal’, adding that ‘the company acted in strict compliance with the law.’