TOKYO (Reuters) – Amazon Japan has submitted a plan to the country’s fair trade regulator on how it will improve practices suspected of violating anti-trust rules, the Asahi Shimbun reported on Friday.
The unit of Amazon.com Inc <AMZN.O> was raided by the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) in 2018 on suspicion of demanding suppliers shoulder part of the cost incurred from selling their products at a discount on the e-commerce giant’s site.
The improvement plan includes a plan to refund suppliers who were pressured to pay this “cooperation money,” the newspaper said.
“We continue to have cooperative and productive discussions with the JFTC,” the company said in an emailed statement to Reuters on Friday in response to the report.
“We are committed to working with our vendors to address their needs. Amazon complies with the laws and regulations in all locales in which we do business,” it said.
Amazon Japan had come under regulatory scrutiny before. In a past probe, the Japan Fair Trade Commission found the firm had required suppliers that sell their products on multiple platforms to list them on Amazon Japan at the same or lower prices.
Amazon Japan agreed to drop the practice and the regulators ended the probe in 2017.
(Reporting by Chris Gallagher; Editing by Christopher Cushing)
