Cartel Criminality: The Mythology and Pathology of Business Collusion

This work sets out ambitiously to be a first dedicated criminology of business cartels. The topic - that of now widely condemned and intensively regulated business strategies such as price fixing, market sharing and bid rigging – has become the subject of an increasingly voluminous critical literature, which is for the most part to be found in the academic domains of law and economics. But as the policy and practice of regulation has moved into a higher gear and enforcement has become more repressive, with an increasing resort to criminal law and quasi-criminal sanctions, the time is ripe for a detailed criminological investigation of the phenomenon of cartelisation and its legal control. In so far as there has been a significant programme of criminalisation of business cartels, this incursion of criminal law into the sphere of business activity deserves critical attention and assessment, not least for what it reveals about the nature of contemporary governance and the interface of the political, the economic and the legal in global society. The justification for such a policy of enforcement and an account of its operation is an important matter, since this is a major public intervention, involving significant resources and consequences. The focus of this criminological enquiry has been the working and impact of the legal sanctions that have been deployed more and more extensively and in an increasingly determined fashion over the last thirty or so years. Much of the material drawn upon in the following report of this research has been assembled as part of a research project carried out by CH and JE at Aberystwyth University, and funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust: ‘Explaining and Understanding Business Cartel Collusion’.