Judgment of the Tribunal on two issues: (1) whether the domestic interchange fees (“IFs”) and multilateral interchange fees (“MIFs”) charged in the UK were as a matter of fact caused by the EEA MIFs which were the subject of the European Commission decision dated 19 December 2007, which found that the Defendants had infringed Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union based on the rules and decisions concerning the cross-border intra-EEA fallback MIFs to be charged by banks issuing Mastercard consumer credit and debit cards to merchants’ acquiring banks (“the Decision”); and (2) the value of commerce to which the UK IFs and MIFs applied.
The proceedings are concerned with UK interchange fees over the period 22 May 1992 to 21 June 2009 (“the relevant period”).
The Tribunal rejected the Class Representative’s allegations that the EEA MIFs which were set in the infringement period (i.e. May 1992 to June 2008) had any significant causative influence, as alleged, on the level of interchange fees, whether bilateral or multilateral, that applied to UK domestic transactions.
The Tribunal did not make any findings as to whether the position would have been the same in a counterfactual world where the levels of EEA MIFs were zero throughout, or very significantly lower than they were. That would depend on the various assumptions made about that counterfactual world.
Finally, the Tribunal found that “on-us” transactions should be included in the Value of Commerce (“VoC”) for the purpose of the proceedings. The VoC throughout the relevant period was as set out in the agreed table produced by the parties’ experts.
