Archive for the 'Conspiracy' Category
April 27, 2014
Co-author with Mark Katz (Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg)
Information surveys are one of the most important functions that an association can perform for members. Surveys can be used to facilitate research initiatives and benchmarking exercises, increase market transparency and customer knowledge, promote improved products and services, and support industry lobbying and advocacy efforts.
April 25, 2014
Information about an interesting new competition law and associations webinar come into my inbox this morning entitled: Antitrust Risks for Trade Associations and Members: Ensuring Compliance Amid Intensive Federal Scrutiny. Given that I work with many associations, I thought I would post the details. While this particular webinar is US-based, many of the same issues and compliance strategies are the same in Canada. Strafford is also an excellent CLE provider (and no I have not been paid to say that!)
April 10, 2014
Parties in price-fixing, market division and other competition/antitrust cartels can go to some fairly extensive lengths to conceal agreements.
April 8, 2014
Earlier today, the Competition Bureau announced that one company and two individuals have pleaded guilty to price-fixing under the Competition Act in relation to an ocean freight cartel (see: here). According to the Bureau, these pleas relate to a price-fixing cartel for various ocean freight related surcharges (including surcharges for currency exchange rate fluctuations and fuel) in operation from 2005 to 2011, which included agreements on rates or formulas used to calculate rates for various surcharges.
March 30, 2014
Canada’s Competition Bureau has issued a number of new anti-cartel (Competition Act conspiracy) compliance materials, including an updated version of its Bid-Rigging Pamphlet and two new pamphlets: a Competitor Collaboration Pamphlet (a more comprehensive set of Bureau enforcement guidelines on this topic already exists) and an entirely new Trade Associations Pamphlet.
The Bureau had been planning to issue a standalone Bulletin on associations several years ago, but has evidently opted to rely on the association related discussion in its Competitor Collaboration Guidelines and this newly issued short pamphlet. The Bureau has also issued a new video on competition law compliance.
March 30, 2014
One competition law topic that I continually find interesting is joint ventures (i.e., collaborations between competitors). While this is a significant area, with a variety of competition law issues that may need to be addressed in relation to a broad spectrum of types of JVs (e.g., joint marketing, joint production, joint R&D, etc.), I have always found the issues that can arise in the JV context very interesting.
March 30, 2014
In an interesting and important decision issued late last week, the British Columbia Supreme Court has certified a Competition Act class action against Visa Canada Corporation, MasterCard International Inc. and a number of major banks (including Bank of America, BMO, Bank of Nova Scotia and CIBC) (Watson v. Bank of America Corporation, 2014 BCSC 532). In this case the plaintiff seeks to represent two classes of Canadian merchants who accepted payments for goods or services by way of Visa and MasterCard credit cards from 2001 to the present.
March 3, 2014
In what can only be described as a somewhat sobering announcement, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced earlier today that a former prime contractor manager has been sentenced to serve 14 years in prison in an ongoing bid-rigging, fraud and kickback case. According to the DoJ, this is the longest sentence ever imposed in the U.S. involving an antirust crime.
Templates/precedents and checklists to run promotional contests in Canada
Templates/precedents and checklists to comply with Canadian anti-spam law (CASL)
