Brussels, 10/03/2006 (Agence Europe) - On Friday, the Commission sent a further letter to Microsoft indicating that despite the explanations provided (see EUROPE 9133) after December's statement of objections (see EUROPE 9096) the company was still not meeting its obligations in terms of interoperability. Monitoring Trustee Neil Barrett said in his last report that “nothing substantial was added to the technical documentation”. The Commission still considers the material to be “incomplete, inaccurate and unusable”.
The Commission has also made public the decision on the nomination of the monitoring trustee responsible for advising it in monitoring Microsoft's compliance on interoperability (see EUROPE 9133 particularly). This decision was adopted in July, before Professor Neil Barrett, whom Microsoft had proposed, was officially appointed in October (see EUROPE 9042). A spokesman said that the Commission felt obliged to do so, given the allegations about the Trustee's activities and suggestions that he had acted in an inappropriate manner in contacting third parties. It was part of the responsibilities of the Trustee to establish pro-active relations with Microsoft's competitors in order to ensure the interoperability of their products with those of Microsoft, the spokesman continued. He said that Microsoft had been fully consulted on this decision. The American company complained in a letter to the Commission of secret meetings between Prof. Barrett and its competitors, such as IBM, Sun or Oracle). The text of the decision and the CVs of the Trustee and his technical assistants are available on the DG Competition website: http: //http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/competition/antitrust/cases/index/by_nr_75.html #i37_792