In her ruling banning Apple from charging a commission on purchases made outside the App Store, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers says that an Apple executive “outright lied under oath.”
According to Gonzalez Rogers, Alex Roman, vice president of finance at Apple, gave testimony that was “replete with misdirection and outright lies.” The judge writes that Roman lied when testifying that Apple hadn’t decided on the 27 percent number for its fee on purchases outside the App Store until January 16th, 2024.
“Contemporaneous business documents reveal that on the contrary, the main components of Apple’s plan, including the 27 percent commission, were determined in July 2023,” Gonzalez Rogers says. “Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies.”
Gonzalez Rogers says that she is referring the case to a US attorney for possible criminal contempt proceedings against Apple and Roman.
“Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction,” Gonzalez Rogers says at the end of the filing (emphasis hers). “It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.”
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