BENGALURU: amazon, which was represented by senior advocate Gopal Subramanium, told the Karnataka High Court on Wednesday that the e-marketplace has no special agreements with sellers and has no control over the product prices being sold on the platform.
The Karnataka HC has been asked by the Supreme Court to decide on the stay in the Competition Commision of India (CCI) probe into alleged anti-competitive practices of e-commerce firms. The HC had last year stayed the probe by the country’s regulator, following which CCI filed a petition before the apex court seeking vacation of the stay.
Subramanium argued that an e-marketplace like Amazon is the facilitator of the competition and in fact the probe ordered by the CCI is a “flagrant violation of the competition act”. As against the accusations made by Delhi Vyapar Sangh, an affiliate of the traders body Confederation of All India traders (CAIT), Amazon said that it has not entered into any selective agreement with sellers like Cloudtail and Appario who have been alleged to control 70 per cent of the marketplace sales.
Subramanium also told the court that these are not Amazon’s entities and no one from the e-tailer’s board of directors controls these companies. The marketplace hosts exclusive launches of smartphone brands, but the same offers are available on the brand websites. Regarding allegations of deep discounting, he said that market retail prices are slashed by brands during sales in which the Amazon have no say.
The Karnataka HC has decided to hear the matter now on day-today basis and the matter has been now adjourned till Thursday. While calling the CCI probe ordered on January 13, 2020 ‘ perverse, arbitrary, untenable in law,” Amazon had earlier said that the order has the potential to cause ‘irreversible loss to the reputation of the company.”