When the license period expires, customers can sign up for maintenance and service contracts at a lower fee.

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But the Spitzer probe found these "kickbacks" prompted Marsh to "steer" contracts to the insurer paying the fattest fee-even when this resulted in a higher price to Marsh's client.

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Around the same time, the European Court asserted that footballers, like other workers, were free to move anywhere at the end of their contracts, without their old employers demanding a transfer fee.

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The annual increase in fee per subscriber is predetermined as a part of multi-year contracts between pay-TV companies and media houses.

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Ecuador has yet to publicize the remuneration fee it would be willing to pay the foreign firms in new service contracts, but one draft agreement calls for the state to retain at least 25 percent of gross income from extracted oil sales.

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He has been trying since 2007 to change foreign oil contracts from production-sharing agreements, under which the foreign producers can have partial ownership of the fields they operate, to servicing contracts, under which the producers would have to pay a production fee and then get reimbursed for the cost of their investment.

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In 2005, the government passed a controversial hydrocarbons law that imposed significantly higher royalties and required foreign firms then operating under risk-sharing contracts to surrender all production to the state energy company in exchange for a predetermined service fee.

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