Conspiring Against Competition

 Dirt Diggers Digest -     A federal judge in Minnesota recently granted final approval to a $75 million settlement between Smithfield Foods and plaintiffs alleging that the company was part of a conspiracy to fix the prices of pork products. This came a week after the Washington State Attorney General announced $35 million in settlements with a group of poultry processors. A couple of weeks ago, a federal judge in New York approved a $56 million settlement of a class action lawsuit in which two drug companies were accused of conspiring to delay the introduction of a lower-cost generic version of an expensive drug for treating Alzheimer’s Disease. All these court actions are part of an ongoing wave of illegal price-fixing conspiracies by large companies throughout most of the U.S. business world.