[joglynne]

Some 46 million people in Britain could potentially benefit from a legal case brought against Mastercard demanding 14 billion pounds in damages for allegedly charging excessive fees, according to court documents filed in London.

The case brought by a former chief financial services ombudsman alleges the payments company charged unlawfully high fees to stores when shoppers swiped their debit or credit cards and these were passed on to consumers in higher prices.

Mastercard is alleged to have done this for 16 years between 1992 and 2008, in more than 600 pages of documents filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal on Thursday."This was almost an invisible tax," Walter Merricks, who is bringing the case, told the BBC. "Mastercard has behaved disgracefully in this. They have not had the reasonableness to accept that what this was doing was damaging UK consumers."

http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-mas...-idUKKCN11E2S7

This lawsuit was originally reported in July and at that time Law firm Quinn Emanuel alleged that the fees charged by Mastercard were a significant cost for retailers and ...

This cost was then passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for goods and services. The lawsuit claims that UK consumers have lost as much as £19bn as a result of the fees.

“The prices of everything we all bought from 1992 to 2008 were higher than they should have been as a result of the unlawful conduct of MasterCard,” said Walter Merricks, a former Chief Financial Services Ombudsman who is spearheading the claim.

snippet In 2014, MasterCard was found to have infringed EU law by imposing intercharge fees on cross-border card transactions.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6f0fdb5c-4...2b3873ae1.html

So, potentially a heck of a lot of us who bought anything between 1992 and 2008 could be in for some compensation.