The Air Cargo Cartel: Lessons for Compliance

Abstract

Cartel enforcement and leniency are issues of increased academic attention. Most of the academic work in this area focuses on scholarship regarding formal modeling of leniency, empirical work, and analyses of broader legal theories, analytical trends and specific decisions. Scholarship has not focused on how leniency works in practice to detect wrongdoing and how robust and effective compliance programs may be used as a tool to take advantage of leniency. This chapter fills in the gap by offering a case study of an effective compliance program that uncovered what was at the time the largest ever international cartel. To do so, the authors undertook interviews with the legal team of Lufthansa, the leniency applicant in the air cargo conspiracy.

Keywords: compliance, cartels, leniency, antitrust, competition, collusion

JEL Classification: K21, L41, M14