Facebook has been fined €110 million (approximately Rs 793 crore) for providing the European Union with “incorrect or misleading” information when it was buying messaging service WhatsApp in 2014. The European Commission penalised the technology giant for saying, at the time of the merger, that it would not match people with their accounts on both platforms, then later doing it anyway, The Guardian reported.

The commission’s inquiry showed the Facebook’s staff knew that there was a way to link people’s WhatsApp numbers to their Facebook accounts. During a review while the merger was taking place, Facebook had said there was no way to do this. Facebook later said its errors “were not intensional”.

The commission said this verdict would not affect its decision to clear the $19-billion (approximately Rs 1.15 lakh crore then) merger in a separate investigation on data protection matters, BBC reported. A fine of nearly double the amount could have been awarded, based on current European regulations for mergers and acquisition, but was limited as Facebook had cooperated during the investigation, the commission said. In a statement, Facebook said, “We’ve acted in good faith since our very first interactions with the Commission and we’ve sought to provide accurate information at every turn.”

In February 2014, Facebook announced that it would buy WhatsApp in cash and stock. Since then, several questions have been raised about how this move has affected user data on both platforms. On May 13, Italy’s Competition Authority fined Facebook €3 million for pushing its WhatsApp users to share their data with the parent company by a misleading set of new terms and conditions. WhatsApp’s privacy policy is currently being examined in India’s Supreme Court after users alleged that the right to privacy of more than 15.7 crore Indians had been violated by the messaging service sharing its users’ personal information with Facebook.