Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes told reporters yesterday that fines against Microsoft for failing to comply with 2004's anti-trust judgement were inevitable.

Asked if she would fine Microsoft, Kroes said: "I can't imagine any other way."

The commission ruled in 2004 that Microsoft was abusing its monopoly position. It made various demands, such as offering a version of Windows without Media Player and opening up APIs for servers.

Kroes is on a two day trip to Germany and made the comments as she arrived in Berlin.

It is believed a meeting was held on Monday to inform individual country regulators that the commission was going ahead with fining the software giant.

The fine is €2.5m a day and has been backdated to last December.

Earlier this week, Microsoft agreed to pay Korean regulators $35m to settle anti-trust complaints.

More from Reuters here (http://today.reuters.com/stocks/QuoteCompanyNewsArticle.aspx?view=CN&storyID=2006-07-06T084544Z_01_L06884592_RTRIDST_0_EU-MICROSOFT-UPDATE-1.XML&rpc=66). ®

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