The European Union courts dismiss the Bouygues Telecom’s complaint against the French government regarding 3G licence allocation. The following opinion will be considered by a panel of top judges. The French mobile operator had complaint about the state’s descision to slash the multi-billion-euro licence fees it charged to two rival operators as unfair and constituted an illegal state subsidy to business.
France had launched a tender for four UMTS concession in 2000, priced at EUR4.95 billion (USD4.3 billion), for which it recieved only two bids, from SFR and France Telecom (Orange). For the remaining two licences regulator planned to allocate t a lower asking price of EUR619 million each including a share of profit. Bouygues came in as the lone bidder for the second auction, after which the French regulator decided that the other two licensees should pay the same amount to maintain a level.
The EU commission had cleared the way for Paris to cut the licence fees in 2004, following which Bouygues launched an appeal to overturn the decision, a case was sthen dismissed by the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg, in 2007.

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