An alleged cartel in the concrete market to be investigated by the Italian Competition Authority

By a decision made on 22 January 2014 (Case I772) the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has opened an Article 102 TFEU investigation against 11 firms alleged to have put into practice a cartel in the markets for the production and commercialization of concrete in the north-east of Italy.  
The ICA feared that the parties had cartelized the concrete market at least in the north-eastern provinces of Udine and Trieste by allocating clients and fixing prices in order to crystallize their market shares. To this end, the parties organized several and frequent meetings between their representatives and a system for the exchange of information through a third party, a consultancy firm. In this way the parties exchanged commercially sensitive data regarding the supplies of concrete to their respective customers. The ICA pointed out that the availability of such data was instrumental in monitoring the parties’ compliance with the agreement and necessary to a retaliatory mechanism that was part of the arrangement.

Incidentally, the ICA also dealt with a cartel in the concrete market in the Mercato del Calcestruzzo case in 1994. Then the ICA found a competition infringement in a market sharing agreement in the geographical area near Milan. This agreements was based on the exchange of information about the quantities of concrete supplied by the cartelists to customers and strict monitoring mechanism which include on-site inspections at the factories of the parties and review of accounting documents.

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