PARIS (AP) – Frantic text messages between French CEOs about cottage cheese prices. Clandestine smoke breaks in a Left Bank apartment to collude on yogurt strategy.
A ruling Thursday by France’s competition authority makes for rich reading, detailing a web of secret meetings, hand-written charts and phone exchanges over six years to fix prices on many of the yogurt-related goods on French supermarket shelves.
Eleven companies were hit with 192 million euros ($203 million) in fines for the cartel, including Yoplait and Lactalis and makers of most of the store-brand yogurt sold around France.
Lactalis did not contest the accusations, but said it would appeal the decision, arguing in a statement that the fines “overestimate in an obvious way the gravity of the facts, and their impact on the economy.” The company said it is committed to obeying the law.
The cartel was uncovered thanks to a special procedure that allows companies to report their own price-fixing activity to regulators in exchange for reduced punishment. Yoplait, majority owned by U.S.-based General Mills Inc., was the first company to report the activity, and was given no fines.