The Philippine Competition Commission (PCC) is mulling over the imposition of a fine against Grab Holdings Inc. for its failure to release the full amount of refunds to its users.
“The Commission is now considering whether or not the circumstances for which those refunds were not actually fully paid to the consumers would merit another fine to be imposed,” Ivy Medina, Officer-in-Charge Director, of the PCC Mergers and Acquisition Office, said during a media briefing in Quezon City on Monday.
Medina said there was a “defect” in the way the ride-hailing app complied, such that the portion of the amount that they should have given was not fully refunded to the consumers.
PCC Chairman Michael G. Aguinaldo noted that there are portions of the refund order that Grab cannot comply with. However, he said the ride-hailing app has stated its reasons for its inability to refund the amounts.
Aguinaldo said the Commission’s decision may revolve around the sufficiency of Grab’s reasons and if the ride-hailing app’s inability to refund the amounts is justified.
One of the reasons cited by Grab for not releasing the required amount is the users’ lack of an e-wallet.
Moreover, the PCC chief said the amount that should be reimbursed to some users may be small and might “actually cost more to find a way to refund it than the actual amount of the refund.”
Last March 2022, the antitrust body ordered Grab to release the remaining P19.30-million refund to eligible users after finding the ride-hailing app’s low disbursement of the refunds from previous fines.
On Monday, Aguinaldo said the ride-hailing app divulged that 70 percent of the said amount has already been refunded while there’s about 30 percent or “about P5 or P6 million” that has not been released.
“I don’t know how much of that is because of that difficulty.”
The antitrust agency fined Grab a total of P63.7 million since 2018 for violations of its price and service quality commitments. In a 2022 statement, the PCC said it was in late 2019 when the Commission imposed on Grab the penalty to return a portion of its commissions to Grab’s passengers for violating its price monitoring commitment.
According to PCC, it has since ordered Grab to issue refunds in the amounts of P5.05 million in November 2019, P14.15 million in December 2019, and P6.25 million in October 2020.
Grab’s takeover of Uber in 2018 raised competition concerns and was subjected to a PCC Decision committing the merged entity to a standard as if it had a rival, the PCC noted.
The antitrust body added that part of Grab’s voluntary commitments was ensuring it will not undertake “unreasonably different” pricing behaviors pre- and post-transaction.
During the monitoring period, however, PCC said it found that the ride-hailing company committed “extraordinary pricing deviations”, which resulted in three sets of penalties.