Apple hit with €60m lawsuit in Italy over iPhone throttling

BT is also in the Italian courts defending fraud accustions

A class action lawsuit has been filed against Apple in Italy over the firm's practice of throttling the performance of its older iPhones.

The suit, third to be filed in Europe over the issue, follows similar suits filed in Spain and Belgium last month.

The latest class action has been brought by Altroconsumo, an Italian consumer rights group, which accuses Apple of engaging in misleading and unfair commercial practices. It alleges that Apple intentionally slowed down apps running on iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6S and 6S Plus models through a mandatory iOS update to encourage customers to buy newer iPhone models.

Altroconsumo, which is backed by parent consumer organisation Euroconsumers, says that over one million of such handhelds were sold in Italy between 2014 and 2020, and therefore Apple should pay €60 million in compensation - based on €60 in average compensation for all Italian consumers deceived by the Apple's practices of planned obsolescence.

"The compensation requested corresponds to the amount paid by consumers for the replacement of the device's battery, which varies between €29 and €89," Altroconsumo says.

Last year, Apple settled similar charges in the US, where a class-action suit was filed, accusing the company of slowing down older iPhones. The company paid out $500 million to settle that case, although it rejected claims that it was engaged in unfair practices.

Recently, Apple also agreed to pay $113 million to settle charges from 33 US states and the District of Columbia for acting deceptively.

The lawsuit against Apple comes at the same time that a trial into alleged accounting irregularities at the Italian unit of British Telecom (BT) Italia opens in Milan.

There are 20 defendants in this case, including Corrado Sciolla, BT's former head of continental Europe, and Richard Cameron, former chief financial officer of BT Global Services.

The Italian prosecutors allege that BT's Italian unit and a network of employees inflated the unit's revenues and generated fake invoices and contract renewals in 2015 and 2016 in efforts to conceal £250 million of losses in a sophisticated fraud.

In 2016, a whistleblower warned BT of the fraud in its Italian unit, and one year later BT took a £530 million charge in its accounts relating to the alleged false accounting case, according to Reuters.

BT has always said that it incurred a loss due to the scandal. However, in 2019, Italian police alleged that BT's executives in London had repeatedly put pressure on executives in Milan to achieve targets and also encouraged them for wrong accounting practices.