The Italian Competition Authority finds two banking cartels implemented by small cooperative banks and their trade associations

In the recent decision in the Case I777, the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has penalized two cooperative trade associations and 14 small cooperative banks for two price-fixing agreements carried out in the province of Bolzano (the Bolzano cartel) from 2007 to 2014 and in the province of Trento (the Trento cartel) from 2013 to 2015, respectively. Under the Bolzano cartel, the parties coordinated their commercial policies by agreeing on the interest rate floor and other relevant commercial terms for mortgages. To this end, the parties exchanged sensitive information in the shape of current and future disaggregate commercial data in three ways: i) at the meetings of their commercial directors, ii) and of their real estate consultants; iii) through the Workshop ROI, which was a tool administered by the local association of the cooperative banks (Federazione Raiffeisen) for the collection and the processing of data regarding the activities of their members. As for the Trento cartel, the local association of the cooperative banks (Federazione Trentina) regularly and frequently determined the benchmark interest rate for mortgages, which was then communicated to its members. This practice influenced the decisions of the banks as for which interest rate to apply to their customers, which amounted to an anti-competitive agreement by object.

The ICA decision is a reminder that also small firms, in this case local cooperative banks, do not escape competition liabilities when they commit hard-core competition breaches like cartels. Finally, the case I777 is one of the first cases in which the ICA applied the attenuating factor of ‘compliance antitrust programme’ in point 23 of its recently adopted Fining Guidelines. The ICA granted a 10% fine reduction to Federazione Raiffeisen and to 10 banks involved in the Bolzano cartel. Crucially, those parties demonstrated to have adopted since 2015 a binding code of conduct and to have trained their employees on antitrust matters.

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