Apple found guilty of illegally fixing prices of iPhone 5 and 6 in Russia

Russia's Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) has held Apple guilty of illegally fixing retail prices of iPhone 5 and 6 models in the country.

The probe concluded that Apple's Russian subsidiary, Apple Rus was accused of infringing laws by ordering 16 retailers to hold the price of these iPhone models and contact them if the devices were sold at "inappropriate" prices. Apple would eventually terminate the sale agreement with these retailers if the pricing guidelines were not met.

The ruling however, only applies to Apple's Russian subsidiary, as the FAS dropped a similar investigation against Apple Inc and other international subsidiaries "due to lack of evidence".

The iPhone-maker is expected to face a fine of up to 15% of its Russian sales revenue, but the company has three months time to appeal against the decision, after it will released later this month.

A spokesperson from the company commenting on the matter told Financial Times, "We worked closely with FAS during their investigation and are glad to put this matter behind us. We work hard to make the best products and services in the world for our customers and are deeply committed to making sure our resellers are able to compete fairly in the markets where we do business."

The investigation concluded that the pricing was being fixed for the last few years – since the launch of the iPhone 5, iPhone 6, 6S and its Plus models. Last year's iPhone 7 and 7 Plus are said to be out of this price fixing ring as the regulator did not find any signs of price fixing.

The 16 major resellers mentioned in the probe are MTS, M Video, Beeline, Eldorado, Euroset , OZON, re: Store, Messenger, Megafon, Yulmart, Media Markt, Citylink, Holodilnik.ru, DNS, ION and Technosila

Last year Russian authorities found American tech giant Google guilty of forcing smartphone-makers to feature its own services more prominently on Android phones.

Further, regulators forced both Apple and Google to remove LinkedIn from their Russian app stores earlier this year.