Cartels can be built and maintained in any industry, be it beer, washing powder, or elevators. Some examples on the ban on cartels. Well, one of the most celebrated, or one of the most discussed cases in recent years was a so called beer case where all of the large breweries basically, Anheuser-Busch, Carlsberg, Oetker which produced a lot of German beers, Warsteiner and Bitburger were basically suspected of fixing beer prices in 2013. Now this case has recently become under investigation by the German Bundeskartellamt so the German antitrust authority. Secondly there was a case referring to washing powder. That's a case that's already done. Henkel, which produced Persil, Proctor & Gamble producing Ariel, Unilever. All three of those were accused and convicted of coordinating prices for household laundry powder detergent in eight European countries for a period of 2002 to 2005. So the cartel started when the companies met to implement an initiative to actually improve the environmental performance of detergent products. So it was interesting, because of course as I mentioned in previous videos, you need some degree of coordination and cooperation and communication to achieve a cartel. So the better you communicate, the easier it gets to form a cartel. And this actually started because they were talking about something completely different. Now, the case was completed in 2011 and the total fine issued by the European commission was 350 million euros. There was another case referring to elevators or escalators. Otis, Kone, Schindler, and ThyssenKrupp, so four major players in the market for elevators and escalators, basically rigged bids for procurement contracts. So how does that work? Well, typically elevators and escalators are purchased through some procurement process, some tendering process. And the idea was that these four firms would speak to each other. They would coordinate, to allocate projects to each other to fix prices and basically not compete and exchange commercially important and confidentially intermediate information in four European countries. This went on for a period of ten years, and in 2007, there was a total fine issued by the European Commission almost equalling, almost getting up to 1 billion euros. With a shortened video quiz, let's finish this video. [SOUND] Wow, so that was a lot of information on the cartel agreements. But as we've mentioned earlier, this isn't the only competition policy instrument that you need to pay attention to. We're now going to lean more about abuse control, if you want to, in the next video.
