PARIS, Sept 13: France’s competition council has fined France Telecom a record 40 million euros after a decade-long investigation into the state operator’s failure to sell its list of subscribers to rival companies at a lower price, the watchdog said Saturday.

The competition council found that France Telecom failed to obey numerous legal injunctions to make its subscriber list available more cheaply to operators.

The fine is one of the biggest in the history of the competition council and was imposed after a mammoth legal process that was started back in 1992.

In its decision reached Friday but made public a day later, the watchdog slammed the “excessive tariffs” France Telecom had continued to charge for its subscriber list despite the repeated injunctions from French courts telling the operator to lower its prices.—AFP