New Delhi, NFAPost: The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), the apex trade association of India, raised doubt on the Enforcement Directorate (ED) decision to serve notice only to Flipkart and avoiding Amazon in slapping it.
The trade association states that the Karnataka High Court had prime facie found both e-commerce firms guilty of indulging in anti-competitive prices.
ED’s action “raises suspicion”, said , CAIT national secretary general Praveen Khandelwal said ED’s action raises suspical in a letter to the investigating agency’s director after it sent a Rs 10,600-crore recovery notice against Flipkart for allegedly violating foreign exchange rules.
CAIT said it has also made a representation on Saturday to Piyush Goyal, minister for commerce and industry, and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and urged them to take action.
The trade body has been vociferously demanding to put a full stop on global ecommerce companies India operation and and penalised for their alleged violation of foreign investment policies. However, the global e commerce players have stood firm that there have not been any violations at all. CAIT has urged that their anti-competitive policies have destroyed the livelihood of small traders.
In its response to the draft amendment to the government’s Consumer Protection ( e-commerce) Rules 2020, CAIT has suggested some sweeping changes, It wants a clear transparent definition of different ecommerce entities. According to CAIT, an inventory e-commerce entity would mean an entity that runs a retail store on its own e commerce platform, owns the inventory of goods and services and sells such goods and services directly to the consumer on a principal to principal basis.
It has also suggested that no e-commerce entity shall make any segmented offers to particular consumers on an arbitrary basis. The classification of consumers shall be on a transparent and objective basis and offerings shall be uniform across consumers.
Secondly, an e-commerce firm will also not use the information collected for sale of goods directly or indirectly by any seller related or not. Thirdly, an ecommerce marketplace entity cannot directly or indirectly license its brand or private label products to third parties to be sold on the platform.
