US Politicians: Amazon Lied to Congress

Five members of the United States Congressional Committee have accused multiple Amazon top executives of lying or misleading Congress about the company’s business practices. Amazon denies the allegations.

The five members are considering a criminal trial over the alleged lies of the Amazon executives. They made this known in a letter to the chief executive of Amazon. Those alleged to have lied include Jeff Bezos, who made a statement to Congress in July 2020, and the company’s associate general counsel, Nate Sutton, who spoke to Congress a year earlier.

This is in response to two reports that appeared last week. Reuters and The Markup wrote that Amazon uses data from third-party sellers on the site for its own benefit to create private-label products. Amazon is also more likely to promote its own products than third-party products. The Amazon top previously denied this. In the letter, lawmakers give Amazon one more chance to provide evidence for its previous statements to Congress.

Amazon denies in a response to Reuters that it misled the commission. “We have denied the related inaccurate reports and have sought to correct them.” Amazon said the company has an internal policy that says that data from individual sellers cannot be used for Amazon’s private-label products. “We will investigate the allegations that this policy has been violated and take appropriate action.”