The USA Government, which is carrying out a major investigation into anti-trust trading in the freight forwarding industry, said last week that six Japanese companies have agreed to plead guilty. The firms admitted that they had fixed certain fees for their freight forwarding services, and promised to pay criminal fines totalling $46.8 million.
The six companies involved had “engaged in a conspiracy to fix and impose certain freight forwarding service fees……..for services provided in connection with air freight forwarding shipments of cargo shipped by air from Japan to the United States,” the department of Justice said. The price-fixing happened from about September 2002 until at least November 2007.
On September 30, 2010, six other international freight forwarders agreed to plead guilty and to pay criminal fines totaling $50.27 million for price fixing between 2002 and 2007.