The European Commission has fined Facebook for €110 million
The European Commission has fined Facebook by €110 million for providing misleading information while checking her transaction for the acquisition of messaging service WhatsApp in 2014.
Calling it a “proportionate and dissuasive penalty”, the European Commission has indicated that in considering the transaction, Facebook said that it does not have technical capabilities for automatic mapping of user accounts on its platform data WhatsApp, but after two years, in August 2016, provided the WhatsApp users the ability to link a phone number to your account Facebook.
“The Commission found that contrary to the assertions of Facebook in the process of the merger consideration in 2014, the technical possibility of automatic matching of the identity of the users of Facebook and WhatsApp already existed and that employees of Facebook knew about this possibility,” said the regulator.
Facebook pointed out in its statement that errors in filed in 2014 the documents was not deliberate, and the Board confirmed that they did not affect the outcome of a possible merger.
Under the terms of the merger, the Commission can impose fines of up to 1 % of the total turnover of companies which intentionally or negligently provide incorrect or misleading information. That is, the penalty could be up to $276 million based on financial results of companies in 2016. However, the European Commission took into account the cooperation of Facebook in consideration of this omission and its recognition of the incident as a violation.
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