Apple has just paid a fine of $13.65 million to the Russian government after a Moscow court found the company guilty of abusing its dominant position in the market through the iOS App Store.
The Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia (FAS) ruled in November that Apple had prohibited app developers from informing users that they had the option to pay for their purchases outside of its store.
In January, the FAS imposed a fine of nearly 1.2 billion rubles on Apple (about $13.65 million). The company paid the money on January 19, which according to the FAS will go directly to the Russian budget at a time when the government is raising funds to support the war in Ukraine.
Russia takes advantage of these fines to finance the war
This is not the first time that Apple has helped the Russian treasury since the war began in early 2022. The FAS said that Apple paid a fine of 906 million rubles ($12.12 million) in February 2022 for an antitrust case alleging that Apple abused its dominant position by distributing applications through its own iOS operating system, giving it a competitive advantage.
The Financial Times writes that, in order to pay the fines imposed by the Russian government, American companies must first request permission from the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, the agency that enforces trade controls.
Apple was one of the many Western companies that suspended the sale of products in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine by this country, but the App Store and some subscription services are still active.
And this despite the fact that the Ukrainian government urged Tim Cook to block the App Store in Russia. It is also possible for Russians to buy discounted iPhones imported from other countries, although the government has banned its employees from using them.
Russia has also been imposing modest fines on Western companies for not storing their data locally: Airbnb, Pinterest, and Twitch were fined 2 million rubles ($38,113) each, and UPS received a fine of 1 million rubles ($19,057) in June 2022.
One of the biggest problems that Russia has had with technology companies since the beginning of the war is hosting what it considers “fake” content related to the invasion. Reddit, Apple, and Wikipedia have been fined for this reason.
