E-wallets

Grab Philippines Slapped With Additional PHP 9 Million Fine for Delayed Refunds

The Philippine Competition Commission (PCC) has imposed another PHP 9 million (approximately US$160,000) fine on Grab Philippines for its failure to fully refund its customers more than three years after it was first ordered to do so.

The latest fine is on top of the PHP 63.7 million (approximately US$1.13 million) in penalties that the PCC had imposed on Grab over the years since it acquired the Philippine operations from its then rival Uber in 2018.

In a resolution on February 2023, the PCC imposed a six-million peso fine on Grab for violating three separate Commission orders for the company to return a combined PHP 25.45 million to its customers.

The refund orders were issued after Grab failed to deliver on its price monitoring commitment.

The earliest commission order was issued in November 2019, followed by a second order a month later, and a third in October 2020. On each occasion, Grab was given a 60-day deadline to complete the refund from receipt of each order.

Additionally, in the same resolution, the PCC also imposed a three-million peso fine on Grab for providing incorrect and misleading information in its compliance reports where Grab claimed that it had completed the refund.

However, PCC’s review found that only 24.16% of the total amount had been returned to Grab’s customers as of June 2021, or more than five months after the deadline for the commission’s third refund order.

It was only after the PCC issued a show-cause order in January 2022 when compliance to the refund order shot up to 73.80% as of April last year, but still fell short of the full refund that Grab had claimed.