Britain's Competition Appeal Tribunal on Monday allowed part of a consumer lawsuit against Apple and Amazon to proceed over claims the two companies restricted competition in the sale of Apple products on Amazon's UK marketplace, reviving a case the tribunal had turned away a year earlier.
The claim alleges Apple and Amazon agreed in 2018 to limit which sellers could offer Apple and Beats-branded products on Amazon's UK website, reducing competition and inflating prices. The three-judge tribunal allowed claims relating to Apple products bought through the marketplace to proceed, but rejected a broader claim covering products bought directly from Apple and other retailers.
The part allowed to proceed could be worth between £289 million and £306 million, including interest, according to the claimant. The tribunal said the wider claims rested on a "complex and speculative theory of harm," while judge Kelyn Bacon described the marketplace claims as "plausible, credible and grounded in the facts."
The split matters because the case has already been through one reset. The tribunal had refused last year to let a largely similar lawsuit, brought by consumer law academic Christine Riefa, go ahead over concerns about the proposed class representative and litigation funding arrangements. The claim was later refiled by Justin Le Patourel, who replaced Riefa as the proposed representative.
It is not a small claim. The action, filed in December 2025 and seeking more than £900 million at the time, is led by former Ofcom consumer policy chief Justin Le Patourel through JLP A&A Class Representative Limited, with support from competition litigation firm Hausfeld & Co LLP, according to earlier reporting.
The case is an opt-out collective action. The proposed class covers anyone who bought new Apple or Beats products from a UK retailer since October 2018, when the alleged agreement took effect, and the claim was filed on December 15, 2025.
For platform operators and brand owners, the split is the practical lesson: competition claims pinned to a specific sales channel cleared the bar, while a theory stretched across every retail channel did not. The mechanism at issue — restricting which third-party sellers can list a brand on a marketplace — is the same lever brand and platform teams negotiate in supply agreements every day, and the tribunal's willingness to let that theory proceed gives those arrangements a live antitrust dimension in the UK.
The claim is also narrower in class terms than its headline suggests. The £900 million figure from the December 2025 filing covered a broader set of retail channels; after Monday's ruling, only purchases made through Amazon's marketplace anchor the case, and the claimant's own estimate for that slice runs £289 million to £306 million including interest. The marketplace claim now proceeds, and that estimate will get its first stress test as the case moves forward.