Japanese OE makers guilty of price fixing

[Hijacker]

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/japan-ca ... ixing-plea

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department says nine Japanese companies and two of their executives will plead guilty and pay millions in criminal fines for conspiring to fix the prices of products sold to automakers.

As part of the scheme, more than $5 billion in auto parts were sold to U.S. car manufacturers and installed in cars sold in the United States and elsewhere.

The department says the affected parts were sold to Chrysler, Ford and General Motors and U.S. subsidiaries of Honda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota and Subaru.

The companies will pay more than $740 million in criminal fines.

shame this won't bring stealership prices down

[dre1507]

So is some of that money going to trickle down back into the car buyers' pockets?

[IanS]

Funny how only Japanese companies were found guilty. I guess they weren't lining the correct pockets with enough cash. I'm sure there is lots of this going on between US parts manufacturers. Not to mention the medical device markets, where price fixing is a downright understatement.

[Mr. Music]

The DoJ just doled out $740 million in fines to eight of the 20 companies they have been investigating. There are also 17 execs that were sentenced to jail. (More from Bloomberg...) I also guess that they weren't lining the correct pockets so the got caught.