MasterCard sued for $19 b in UK’s biggest damages claim

Close to 46 million people in Britain could potentially benefit from a lawsuit brought against MasterCard demanding £14 billion ($19 billion) in damages for allegedly charging excessive fees, according to court documents filed in London. 

The case, brought by a former chief financial services ombudsman, alleges the payments company charged unlawfully high fees to stores when shoppers swiped their debit or credit cards, and these were passed on to consumers at higher prices. 

MasterCard is alleged to have done this for 16 years between 1992 and 2008, in more than 600 pages of documents filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal on Thursday Sep 08,2016

“This was almost an invisible tax,” Walter Merricks, who is bringing the case, told the BBC. “MasterCard has behaved disgracefully. They have not had the reasonableness to accept that this was damaging UK consumers.” 

MasterCard in a statement denied any wrongdoing.“We continue to firmly disagree with the basis of this claim and intend to oppose it vigorously,” the world’s second-largest payments network said

The lawsuit comes after the EU’s antitrust regulator found, in 2014, that MasterCard’s fees to store owners to process international payments within the EU were excessive. 

Law firm Quinn Emanuel said the lawsuit was the largest damages claim in British history and would be brought under a law, meaning consumers would automatically be claimants unless they opt out

Any person living in Britain who used a credit card, cash or cheques, and was over 16 years old in the period covered by the lawsuit, will automatically be part of the claim.

If the £14-billion claim was shared equally between the number of eligible claimants, each person could receive more than 300 pounds each