Amazon Dragging Its Feet on Bezos Testimony, House Democrat Says

(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos is resisting calls to testify before Congress, according to a House Democrat leading an investigation into competition in Big Tech.

Meanwhile, his peers at Alphabet Inc., Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc. are considered likely to appear.

Bezos “has expressed reservations about appearing -- through a representative,” said Representative David Cicilline, who chairs the antitrust subcommittee and has suggested previous testimony by the company may have been untruthful. “No one in this country is above the law, no one is above answering a congressional subpoena.”

In an interview streamed by Politico, the lawmaker also said on Thursday that he had spoken “very recently” with Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Apple’s Tim Cook and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and expected “all three of them will appear voluntarily.”

Cicilline and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which includes the antitrust panel, wrote to Bezos on May 1 that they expected his testimony, but were prepared to compel it, particularly after media reports that appeared to contradict prior company testimony about its treatment of third-party merchants on its site.

Cicilline also said he was reviewing whether he would refer the testimony, by company lawyer Nate Sutton, to the Justice Department for an investigation of perjury charges.

Sutton testified last year that the company doesn’t use data it collects on sales to favor its own products over third-party sellers, but a recent Wall Street Journal report contended that the e-commerce giant used such data to develop competing products.

Cicilline has said he plans to finish the investigation with a report and previously called for the tech CEOs to inform the final conclusions with personal testimony. Recent appearances by Zuckerberg and Pichai were significant milestones.

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