MasterCard Inc. lost a court challenge that sought to overturn a European Union decision that the company's cross-border card fees violated antitrust rules, Bloomberg News reported today. The EU's General Court backed the European Commission’s decision that MasterCard unfairly inflated the transaction fees paid by retailers for processing payments, according to a statement from the court today. MasterCard's "approach tends to overestimate the costs borne by the issuing banks and, moreover, inadequately to assess the advantages which merchants derive from that form of payment," the Luxembourg-based tribunal said in the ruling.
