EU antitrust chief is probing Facebook's response on WhatsApp investigation

EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said that she was reviewing Facebook’s response to charges the US social network provided misleading information during its bid for messaging service WhatsApp which may result in a hefty fine for the company. The European Commission in December last year said Facebook’s statements during the regulator’s scrutiny of the $22 billion deal in 2014 were incorrect when it said that it was unable reliably to match the two companies’ user accounts.

However, this was technically possible at that time, the EU Competition Commissioner said, giving Facebook until Jan. 31 to defend itself. “We have now got the reply from Facebook and we are now analyzing it,” Vestager told lawmakers during a European Parliament hearing. The company faces a fine of as much as 1% of its global turnover, or about $179 million based on 2015 revenues.

Microsoft was hit with a 561 million euro ($606.44 million)penalty in 2013 for breaking an antitrust promise to regulators, underlining how serious the Commission views procedural breaches. This comes months after European privacy watchdogs warned WhatsApp on Friday over sharing user information with parent company Facebook, and cautioned Yahoo over a 2014 data breach and scanning of customer emails for US intelligence purposes.

With inputs from Reuters