Information Exchanges – Difficult Not To Go Bananas!

The European Court of Justice recently confirmed that pre-pricing communications between competitors involving discussions about price-setting factors, quotation prices and pricing trends may be incompatible with EU antitrust law if they make it possible to reduce the degree of uncertainty between participants as regards their strategy or conduct on the market.

The Bananas Cartel

In 2008, the European Commission fined a number of banana suppliers as they engaged in bilateral pre-pricing communications, during which they discussed banana price-setting factors, pricing trends or gave indications of quotation prices for the forthcoming week. The Commission considered these information exchanges were liable to influence the market players' pricing behavior, concerned the fixing of prices and gave rise to a concerted practice having as its object the restriction of competition, thus resulting in a breach of EU competition law. The General Court and, most recently, the Court of Justice, the highest court of the EU judiciary, confirmed these findings.1

Appeal to the Court of...