The European Union slapped a 337.5 million euro ($366 million) high-quality Thursday on Mondelez, the U.S. confectioner behind main manufacturers together with Oreo, for proscribing gross sales of merchandise inside the 27-country bloc.

Mondelez, previously known as Kraft, is without doubt one of the world’s largest producers of chocolate, biscuits and occasional, with income of $36 billion final 12 months.

The EU fined Mondelez “as a result of they’ve been proscribing the cross border commerce of chocolate, biscuits and occasional merchandise inside the European Union,” the EU’s competitors commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, mentioned.

“This harmed customers, who ended up paying extra for chocolate, biscuits and occasional,” she advised reporters in Brussels.

“This case is about worth of groceries. It is a key concern to European residents and much more apparent in instances of very excessive inflation, the place many are in a cost-of-living disaster,” she added.

The free motion of products is without doubt one of the key pillars of the EU’s single market.

Mondelez manufacturers additionally embrace Philadelphia cream cheese and Ritz crackers in addition to chocolate manufacturers Cadbury and Cote d’Or.

The fee, the EU’s highly effective antitrust regulator, mentioned Mondelez “abused its dominant place” in breach of the bloc’s guidelines.

It mentioned the confectioner engaged in “anticompetitive agreements or concerted practices” between 2012 and 2019 together with limiting wholesale prospects’ capacity to resell merchandise and ordering them to use larger costs for exports in comparison with home gross sales.

The EU’s probe dates again to January 2021 however the suspicions had led the bloc’s investigators to hold out raids in Mondelez workplaces throughout Europe in November 2019.

Based on the fee, between 2015 and 2019, Mondelez additionally refused to provide a dealer in Germany to keep away from the resale of chocolate in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Romania, “the place costs have been larger.”

It additionally stopped the availability of sure chocolate merchandise in The Netherlands “to forestall them from being imported into Belgium, the place Mondelez was promoting these merchandise at larger costs.”

Mondelez, nonetheless, insisted the high-quality associated to “historic, remoted incidents, most of which ceased or have been remedied nicely upfront of the fee’s investigation.”

“Many of those incidents have been associated to enterprise dealings with brokers, that are usually carried out by way of sporadic and infrequently one-off gross sales, and a restricted variety of small-scale distributors growing new enterprise in EU markets wherein Mondelez shouldn’t be current or would not market the respective product,” it added in a press release.

The large had put apart 300 million euros for the high-quality final 12 months.

“No additional measures to finance the high-quality can be needed,” it mentioned.