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OFT offers crackdown incentives
29 February, 2008
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is to pay up to £100,000 for insider tip-offs to help it identify illegal cartels.
The incentive, designed to help the OFT beef up its crackdown on cartels, will initially run for 18 months.
After this period the OFT will assess its progress and decide whether it is to become a permanent arrangement.
Sums will be paid as a reward for accurate and verifiable information, calculated according to a set formula and not up for negotiation.
Simon Williams, OFT senior director of cartels and criminal enforcement, said: "Cartels are very damaging both to businesses and consumers and they are usually conducted in secret making them hard to detect. Cartels are not the preserve of big business.
"We believe that it is in the public interest to offer financial incentives in the hope that it will encourage more people who have good information about the existence of hard core cartel activity to come forward, and in exceptional circumstances these incentives may be as high as £100,000."
Cartels are prohibited under the Competition Act, and any business found to be a member of a cartel could be fined up to ten per cent of its turnover.
Furthermore, it is a criminal offense under the Enterprise Act for individuals to dishonestly take part in cartels. Anyone convicted of this could receive a maximum of five years imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine.