Courts Lenient On Price-Fixing
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Price-fixing offenders are being penalised less today than they were in the last decade, suggesting ambivalence on the government’s part, according to a report in today’s Australian Financial Review (AFR), based on information gathered from an academic at Melbourne University.

The average penalty for price-fixing from 2000 to 2007 was $52,543, with the maximum penalty resting at $500,000. From 1993 to 1999 however, the median penalty was $72,196, according to Melbourne University academic, Caron Beaton-Wells.

Beaton-Wells says her findings represent ambivalence from government, businesses and courts regarding the seriousness of the offence, and sends doubt on the willingness of judges to incarcerate price-fixers if the government makes cartels a criminal offence, as promised in 2005.

“Overall there is a low level of support in Australia for treating serious cartel conduct as crime, or at least that such support should not be taken for granted,” Beaton-Wells told the AFR.

This news comes in the midst of a landmark price-fixing case against packaging company Visy, which could see the company and its head, Richard Pratt, fined a record $36 million.

 

According to Beaton-Wells, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is more than willing to roll Pratt’s penalty into the company’s, rather than prosecuting him separately as is the case with certain other price-fixing cases such as the case against former Topfield-distributor, Digital Products Group, and its director Jai Kemp, who were ordered to pay $238,000 and $42,000 respectively.

Two other Visy executives could be penalised separately to the tune of $2 million combined.

Family First leader Steve Fielding said separately yesterday that individual executives who perform price-fixing should be jailed up to 10 years due to the seriousness of the crime, which is twice the amount proposed by the Government, said the AFR.

“Price fixing is fraud, it is theft, and the punishment must fit the crime,” he told the AFR.