UK Tribunal Orders Microsoft to Disclose Secret Slides

The UK Competition Appeal Tribunal has issued a consent order demanding that Microsoft disclose internal documents and communications from past and present executives regarding a previously undisclosed Second-Hand Software presentation. This known adverse document is central to a £270 million (about $361 million) antitrust lawsuit filed by secondhand software reseller ValueLicensing in April 2021. Microsoft has until October 31 to explain why it did not disclose the presentation earlier, and must search the records of former executives Kevin Turner, Jean-Philippe Courtois, and Joe Matz for more than 40 search terms, including SHS, ValueLicensing, used licenses, and do nothing.

ValueLicensing alleges that Microsoft abused its market dominance in the UK and the European EEA, comprising 27 countries, by restricting customers from reselling perpetual licenses for products like Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. In exchange for subscription discounts on cloud services like Office365 and Azure, customers allegedly agreed to clauses that prevented them from reselling their pre-owned licenses. Microsoft argues that any abuse of dominance was objectively justified and that its terms were necessary and reasonable. Meanwhile, a separate opt-out class action claim filed by barrister Alexander Wolfson in May 2025 also alleges overcharges due to these practices.

For enterprise CIOs, procurement leads, and IT financial managers, this legal battle highlights the ongoing validity of the secondary market for perpetual software licenses. Organizations that surrendered perpetual licenses during enterprise agreement renewals may have given up quantifiable asset value. Practitioners can use these regulatory developments as leverage during contract renewals with Microsoft. Furthermore, IT leaders should evaluate hybrid licensing strategies, combining pre-owned perpetual licenses for static workloads with cloud subscriptions to reduce costs, while watching for licensing penalties when running legacy software on rival clouds like AWS or GCP.