LONDON—A lawsuit to be filed on behalf of consumers in the U.K. will seek $24.6-billion from MasterCard over cross-border transaction fees that were deemed illegal in 2014, according to Bloomberg.
A European Commission hearing in 2014 revealed that MasterCard's cross-border interchange fees violated EU law.
Bloomberg reported that Walter Merricks, a lawyer who once led the U.K. organization that handles consumer disputes with banks, has hired Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP to draft a lawsuit they plan to file by September. The claim would be the U.K.’s biggest and one of the first filed under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, Bloomberg said.
Bloomberg noted that MasterCard has faced numerous lawsuits since EU courts said the company’s fees for cross-border payments unfairly restricted competition. The company had said that a cap imposed by the European Commission on what it charged retailers to process transactions on foreign cards would shift the burden onto consumers, an argument the Court of Justice rejected. The underlying antitrust investigation into the fees is ongoing and the company said in October that it risks “substantial” fines in the matter, Bloomberg said.
“The prices of everything we all bought from 1992 to 2008 were higher than they should have been as a result of the unlawful conduct of MasterCard,” Merricks, who is the lead claimant, stated in a report in Bloomberg. “My aim is to get the redress to which U.K. consumers are entitled and to ensure that MasterCard cannot hold on to the illegal profits."