GRAB Philippines (MyTaxi.PH, Inc.) has to pay P6.5 million in fine for submitting “deficient”, “incorrect” data to the Philippine Competition Commission (PCC) as part of the watchdog’s price monitoring.
”[T]he Commission imposed last Tuesday a fine of P6.5 million on Grab Philippines for submitting deficient, inconsistent and incorrect data for the monitoring of its compliance with its voluntary commitments,” PCC Chairman Arsenio M. Balisacan said in a press conference on Friday.
”The (third party) monitor, together with the monitoring team of the PCC, found that there were certain inconsistencies, inaccuracies with the data that were provided as it relates to the price monitoring commitment. Suffice to say that this prevented the monitor and the PCC monitoring team from carrying out its monitoring of the pricing commitments in an effective way…” PCC Commissioner Johannes R. Bernabe said in the same briefing.
Grab Philippines country manager Brian P. Cu said the company will appeal the regulatory action.
Grab is required to submit to the PCC by Monday the lacking data covering Aug. 10-Nov. 10 last year — the first quarter of the one-year monitoring period of its compliance with voluntary commitments.
Last August, the competition watchdog approved Grab’s acquisition of Uber Philippines after the former submitted a set of voluntary commitments relating to service quality, fare transparency, pricing, removal of “see destination” feature, driver/operator non-exclusivity, monitoring of incentives and improvement plan.
The PCC then tapped United Kingdom-based Smith & Williamson (S&W) to monitor Grab’s compliance with its commitments.
Mr. Bernabe said Grab was supposed to submit pricing data pre- and post-transaction for the monitor to compare, but it was not able to present its complete historical pricing record.
Asked for details on the deficiencies, Mr. Bernabe replied that “… [t]o the extent that they do not have a complete record of this pricing coefficient data which they did not tell us prior to the undertaking, and to the extent that for them to provide this data, they have had to reverse-engineer and essentially come up with data that is subject to human intervention rather than what is shown in their electronically stored data… one can surmise that there is a possibility that because the data is subject to human intervention, it is not exactly the way it should be…”
APPEAL LOOMS
In a statement, Grab Philippines’ Mr. Cu explained that “PCC required us to submit our post-transaction data and — given the nature and the huge volume of data that we need to extract and prepare — Grab was working under very limited timelines to meet PCC’s deadline.”
”During the voluntary commitment negotiations, Grab recommended various ways to present the requested data based on how the system can best provide them. Given enough time, we can reconcile our data structure with theirs,” he added.
Grab has until Feb. 7 to submit its motion for reconsideration.
In October last year, the PCC charged Grab P16 million for violations of interim measures the watchdog had imposed in April. — Denise A. Valdez

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