Antitrust Law Daily Wrap Up, ANTITRUST NEWS: EC delivers €19.5M fine to envelope products cartel, (Dec 11, 2014)
By Greg Hammond, J.D.
The European Commission (EC) has fined five envelope producers nearly €19.5M for engaging in a cartel to allocate customers and coordinate prices for the sale of standard and printed envelopes. The companies include Bong, of Sweden; GPV and Hamelin, of France; Mayer-Kuvert, of Germany; and Tompla, of Spain.
The EC’s investigation into the cartel began in September 2010. It found that the companies’ top management orchestrated a number of multilateral and bilateral meetings, in which the cartel coordinated responses to tenders launched by major European customers, agreed on price increases; and exchanged commercially sensitive information. The overall goal of the cartel, according to the EC, was to allocate customers and coordinate prices of envelopes, which were typically purchased by stationary distributors and large companies in Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
“For over four years, instead of competing with each other these companies agreed to artificially increase prices for envelopes across a number of Member States,” stated EC Commissioner in charge of competition policy, Margrethe Vestager. “Everybody uses envelopes. When cartelists raise the prices of every day household objects they do so at the expense of millions of Europeans. The Commission’s fight against cartels penalizes such behaviour and also acts as a deterrent, protecting consumers from harm. On this case we have closed the envelope, sealed it and returned it to the sender with a clear message: don’t cheat your customers, don’t cartelise.”
In setting the companies’ fines, the EC considered each company’s sales of the envelope products over the European Economic Area; the serious nature of the infringement; the geographic scope; and its duration. All five companies received reductions in their fines from the EC’s 2006 Leniency Notice and/or 2008 Settlement Notice. As a result, Tompla was fined €4.729M; Hamelin was fined €4.996M; Mayer-Kuvert was fined €4.991M; GPV was fined €1.651M; and Bong was fined €3.118M.
News: Antitrust