CJEU Upholds €61.44 Million Fine Against Toshiba for Participation in Gas Insulated Switchgear Cartel (July 6, 2017) [1]
On July 6, 2017, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled [3] in Toshiba v. Commission to uphold a €61.44 million fine on Toshiba (including a further amount of €4.65 million joint and severally with Mitsubishi) for its participation in a cartel on the market for gas insulated switchgear (GIS) between 1988 and 2004. According to the press release [4], the “undertakings which participated in the cartel concluded an agreement with a view to coordinating their commercial activity worldwide and developed a quota system aimed at determining the market shares which each group could share among its members.” In January 2007, the European Commission imposed a fine of €86.25 million on Toshiba, in addition to the €4.65 million with Mitsubishi, and after a finding from the General Court “that the Commission had infringed the principle of equal treatment in calculating those fines,” the Commission recalculated the numbers and fined Toshiba €56.79 million, plus the €4.65 million to be paid joint and severally with Mitsubishi. The General Court upheld challenges to those figures and the Court in the instant case dismissed Toshiba’s appeal of that judgment, holding that, inter alia, “the fact that, in 2003, Toshiba had no turnover of its own in the GIS sector is a factor which objectively differentiates its situation from that of other undertakings that participated in the cartel, in particular the European undertakings. Toshiba cannot therefore assert an infringement of the principle of equal treatment in that respect.”