Is Antitrust Enforcement On the Cusp of a Sea Change?

This year, around the world, antitrust fines for cartels engaged in price-fixing are way down.

A report released this week by Morgan Lewis & Bockius projected fines could drop by 70 percent: Through the first half of 2017, global cartel fines stood at $1.2 billion compared to $7.8 billion for all of 2016, the reportfound .

It left open why exactly fines are dropping. Is it a temporary pause while enforcement authorities invest resources in building new cases? Or are cartel members not self-disclosing their price fixing schemes under amnesty programs that offer immunity from prosecution?The latter, so-called “leniency” application has been the ...