Antitrust Prosecutions Outside the United States

The Sherman Act was 115 years old in the year 2005. Because of active antitrust enforcement by public and private parties and frequent appeals of decisions, the United States has the richest body of legal decisions of any jurisdiction in the world. Even cartel cases, one of the more settled areas of federal antitrust law, often receive the attention of the high courts. Recent court opinions have addressed the extent of extraterritoriality and the limits of the per se rule in cartel cases. However, the changes in cartel laws and enforcement have been greatest outside the United States.

This section summarizes the non-U.S. antitrust investigations and sanctions as they had evolved to late 2000 in the cases of the lysine, citric acid, and vitamins conspiracies. These three are simply among the better documented of hundreds of international cartels prosecuted by the world’s antitrust authorities (Connor and Helmers 2006). In many cases these agencies release far more details about the conduct of cartels than does the DOJ (e.g., EC 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2005).