ABSTRACT
In recent years the U.S. Justice Department has brought some of America’s largest criminal cases to trial. The defendants are global managers from Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, South Korea and Switzerland as well as from the United States. The charge is collusion with competitors to fix global prices. The penalty is a hefty fine for the company and a jail sentence for the manager. One price-fixing case involved vitamins. Multinational pharmaceutical firms reached production and price agreements that raised prices to packaged-foods companies such as General Mills, Kellogg’s, Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble. These higher prices were of course passed on to consumers who took vitamins, drank milk or ate cereal. Similarly, investigators uncovered a 17-year price-fixing conspiracy among American, German and Japanese producers of sorbates, a food preservative. This cartel is estimated to have affected over a billion dollars in sales in the United States alone.
