Grassing up the competition

Your director of sales has incurred the wrath of his much put-upon secretary for the last time. She’s read about how the Office of Fair Trading will pay £100,000 to anyone providing clear evidence of a price-fixing cartel. She’s seen a recent e-mail he sent to a friend at a rival company, saying how much he is going to pitch to win a job. She’s also got a copy of the friend’s grateful reply, which says he’ll return the favour.

It’s not a hard decision for her. His reputation is for being cantankerous and abusive; she’s at the end of her tether. £100,000 will pay off her mortgage, meaning she won’t have to work full-time again unless she wants to. So she forwards both messages to the OFT and suddenly both companies are under investigation.

If this sounds far-fetched, give your competition and employment lawyers a call. Thanks to an OFT initiative announced in February, disaffected, Machiavellian or even just highly principled employees now have an even greater incentive to drop their companies in the brown stuff.

If further indication is needed of how hot an issue competition law is right now, one interview for this article with a leading competition partner ended abruptly as a client had been dawn-raided that day. Antitrust infringements and price-fixing cartels are front-page news. In the parlance of ’70s cop shows, the OFT needs more collars, so wants snouts on every street corner, ready to shop companies if the price is right.

The OFT’s reward system for intelligence about competition infringements is mainly aimed at company insiders who are aware of a cartel but are not personally caught up in the illegal activity. It’s the latest in a succession of measures brought in by the watchdog since the Competition Act 1998 came into force (see box, ‘UK cartels: recent milestones, page 38).

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