Apple is attempting to thwart a lawsuit stipulating it throttled the batteries of its mobile phones about five years ago.

The London lawsuit, brought to court by consumer rights campaigner Justin Gutmann, says that Apple throttled iPhones with updates to deliberately hide that its batteries were defective.

iPhone models included in the case are: iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6S, 6S Plus, SE, 7, 7 Plus, 8, 8 Plus, and X models.

In the court proceedings, Gutmann’s prosecutors argued that in order to hide the malfunction of batteries, Apple throttled older models with software updates and installed a power manager which limited capabilities.

These measures would not only hide that the battery was defective, but encourage users to buy new phones as the entire system would appear unable to cope.

Apple denies this, saying the claims were infactual. They did, however, concede that the batters of certain iPhone 6 modles were defective, and replacement batteries were offered to customers.

Further, they did admit that the 2017 power management update decreased the battery of iPhone 6s, but only by 10%.

Now, Gutmann has asked the Competition Appeal Tribunal for certification of the case so it can proceed to trial.

If certified, the case will proceed to a London court and Apple could owe £1.6 billion to affected consumers.

The 2017 update has seen Apple under fire before – they were previously sued in California and Arizona in the US, paying out $500m (£398m) and $113m (£89.9m) respectively.

Allegedly, Apple intended to mask defective batteries in their iPhone models with a power management tool update, which would stop iPhones from using battery power when low on charge. This would cause iPhone performance to falter or even cut out altogether when the iPhone battery was low.

The throttling attempt via update did not improve battery performance, and critics have cried that the update would only force users to exchange their batteries or buy new phones, increasing overall profits fro the company.

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“Instead of doing the honourable and legal thing by their customers and offering a free replacement, repair service or compensation, Apple instead misled people by concealing a tool in software updates that slowed their devices by up to 58%,” Gutmann said in his case filings.

Apple did eventually address the issue, reconfiguring the update and offering a battery replacement service, but Gutmann says service was not publicised enough to make up for the issue.