CANBERRA, Australia — Australia’s customer guarddog on Friday called for Qantas Airways to be penalized with a record fine for apparently selling tickets on thousands of flights that had currently been canceled.
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb stated Qantas’ charge for apparently breaching customer law oughtto be more than double the Australian record 125 million Australian dollar ($81 million) fine enforced on the Volkswagen Group in 2019 for deceptive clients about the level of exhaust emissions from its diesel engines.
“We thinkabout that this oughtto be a record charge for this carryout,” Cass-Gottieb informed Australian Broadcasting Corp. “We are going to lookfor a charge that will highlight that this is not simply to be a expense of doing organization.”
“We thinkabout these charges to haveactually been too low. We believe the charges needto be in hundreds of million, not 10s of million,” she included.
The commission submitted a suit versus Qantas in the Federal Court Thursday declaring Australia’s flagship airlinecompany engaged in incorrect, deceptive or misleading conduct by marketing tickets for more than 8,000 flights from May through July last year that had currently been canceled however not eliminated from sale.
Qantas canceled 1-in-4 flights throughout the three-month duration.
Qantas kept selling tickets on average for more than