Mexico regulators to vote on $1 billion fine vs tycoon Slim | Reuters Regulators are due to vote on Monday on one of Mexico's biggest antitrust cases, a $1 billion fine for tycoon Carlos Slim, which has been bogged down in court appeals and disputes for a year. Federal competition commission Cofeco slapped Telcel, the cash cow of Slim's giant telecoms company America Movil, with the record sanction in April 2011 after ruling the company charged excessive prices to wireless and wireline competitors to connect to its network. Telcel appealed the fine and even managed to ban Cofeco's President Eduardo Perez Motta from taking part in a second vote, where the agency will decide if it ratifies, drops or modifies the fine against Slim, the world's richest man. Perez Motta got into trouble last year with comments he made about the agency's crackdown on Telcel. The Slim company complained of unfair treatment by Cofeco's chief regulator, filing a motion that cut Perez Motta out of that second vote, which was originally expected in September. Getting Slim to pay such a large sum would be a major victory for Cofeco, whose ability to enforce the rules in a country where many major industries are concentrated in the hands of a few powerful families is seen as weak.
Maybe Gates will climb back to #1 now. Telcel is brutal to deal with if you have a complaint of over charging or unauthorized charges. They sell your number, or somehow make it accessible to other customers, including ones that start billing you weekly if you simply open a text message and click on a link. In Sept I bought a chip for my daughter to use in an extra phone that I have. She immediately told me it would not allow her to make a call. The chip comes with $50 in credit and I paid $300 more for and extra $450 so she should have had $500 in total credit. They told me that their records indicated a single call to a local number that lasted 2 hours, 59 minutes till the credit was used up. This happened when my daughter was at the beach at her hotel, with 7 other gals (Bachlorette Party) and the phone was turned off and in her purse. Profeco was no help. Telcel finally agreed to a $200 credit and I told the guy to bite me. By this time she was gone back to the states. I became The Avenger and can say no more.
Ha its the same all over. We get calls here at our office in the US aksing to update our FREE listing with yellow pages and my boss had said ok and then the bills start coming. Was a real pita to get his money back and stop the ?FREE? listing.
Yeah, they're ridiculous to deal with. I added 300 pesos to my prepaid number because I mostly use the net, and they're supposed to give you something like 300 MB of data with that much. But I got one megabyte for 300! I was irate, so I called Telcell for them to tell me that I had previous credit, so they didn't give me anymore data (WTF?) and that there was nothing they can do about it. I mean I thought American carriers were bad until I moved back here. They're completely out in the open about screwing you over here. The problem is I don't have another choice because my phone is unlocked and it has the frequencies that Telcell uses, so if I want to use my 500 dollar phone, I have to use Telcell. Ridiculous.
