Action against cartels is a specific type of antitrust
enforcement. A cartel is a group of similar, independent
companies which join together to fix prices, to limit production
or to share markets or customers between them. Instead of
competing with each other, cartel members rely on each others'
agreed course of action, which reduces their incentives to
provide new or better products and services at competitive
prices. As a consequence, their clients (consumers or other
businesses) end up paying more for less quality. This is why
cartels are illegal under EU competition law and why the
European Commission imposes heavy fines on companies involved in
a cartel. Since cartels are illegal, they are generally highly
secretive and evidence of their existence is not easy to find.
The 'leniency policy' encourages companies to hand over inside
evidence of cartels to the European Commission. The first
company in any cartel to do so will not have to pay a fine. This
results in the cartel being destabilised. In recent y