Executives Beware: Trends In Criminal Cartel Enforcement

Keywords: cartel enforcement, antitrust,

After racking up record corporate criminal fines in three of the last four years, one might think that the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice ("DOJ") had made a strategic decision to focus more of its enforcement efforts on corporations and somewhat fewer resources on corporate executives. That would be wrong. Although DOJ's efforts to prosecute individuals may not always receive the same sort of publicity that its high-dollar corporate prosecutions and settlements do, the fact is that corporate executives never have been more squarely in DOJ's crosshairs than they are today.

DOJ's intense focus on individual executives, especially foreign nationals, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although the United States has treated cartel activity as a crime for more than a century, it is only in the last 20 years that enforcement against individuals has been stepped up in a significant way. Price-fixing and bid-rigging