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Apple Wants to Get Court-appointed Monitor Tossed Out

TMCnet Feature

January 09, 2014

Apple Wants to Get Court-appointed Monitor Tossed Out

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By Ed Silverstein
TMCnet Contributor

Apple (News - Alert) says a court-appointed monitor – who is supposed to follow company progress on antitrust issues – is biased and costs too much, and the company wants him tossed out.


Attorney Michael Bromwich was named to monitor Apple’s progress on allegations of price fixing of e-books. Now, after continuing tensions, Apple has asked U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in Manhattan to disqualify Bromwich from the job.

Cote named Bromwich as the monitor in October after she ruled that Apple conspired with five publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster) to increase e-book prices above the prices charged by Amazon.com (News - Alert).

Apple claims Bromwich overstepped his mandate. Bromwich is getting paid $1,100 an hour, according to Reuters, which the company called "excessive."

In a letter to the judge, Apple’s attorney, Theodore Boutrous, said Bromwich also expressed a  “wholly inappropriate declaration in an adversarial proceeding” which was “compounded by his conduct and the circumstances surrounding his appointment and activities, including his reliance on pre-appointment conversations with the court and plaintiffs as grounds for expanding his mandate beyond the terms of the final judgment, his active collaboration with plaintiffs to broaden the scope of his mandate in this manner and oppose Apple's motion for stay, his financial demands, and his adversarial, inquisitorial and prosecutorial communications and activities toward Apple since his appointment.”

Bromwich has been asking for interviews with Apple executives and board members who do not have a connection with antitrust policy, the company claims, according to The Register. Apple has been working to block the interviews. On the other hand, Bromwich claims Apple gave him "far less access than I have ever received during a comparable period of time in the three other monitorships I have conducted," according to The Wall Street Journal.

"Mr. Bromwich appears to be simply taking advantage of the fact that there is no competition here or, in his view, any ability on the part of Apple, the subject of his authority, to push back on his demands," Bloomberg (News - Alert) reported based on court filings. Bromwich asked for $138,432 from Apple for two weeks’ worth of services. That includes a 15 percent surcharge for being a consultant. Last year, The Register predicted that Bromwich's first two weeks of invoices would mean a five-year appointment would cost Apple over $16 million.




Edited by Cassandra Tucker


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