Corporate price collusion

One of the richest veins of conspiracy thinking is the realm of corporate multi-national business. You'll note that I don't say conspiracy theory, because whilst there are unproven theories in the corporate World there are plenty that are not only well established but that it appears some corporate operators are actually proud of. We have already briefly touched on corporate tax avoidance in a previous article, and another area that has been established over the last twenty years through a series of court cases is the phenomenon of price fixing. The reason that conspiracies around corporations are so readily accessible is that there are very often crossovers at board level between competitive companies, particularly in fields where specialised knowledge is at a premium, such as pharmaceuticals and finance. Where there is crossover, technically there should be no dissemination of sensitive information between competitive companies, but how often is this really the case. In the UK we have seen court cases regarding the operations of large pharmaceutical companies colluding to fix prices offered to the National Health Service (NHS) thereby breaching competition laws, but it goes further than that.

What many people don't realise is the reach that these large companies have. They not only supply their own products and services but are behind supply to other smaller companies. They exert influence at the highest political levels and reach into education, health, the military, in fact almost ever aspect of modern life. Let us consider one company in particular, active in many aspects of the petrochemical industry. Haliburton is one of the largest companies in the World, funding political campaigns, research, education, economic development and healthcare amongst many other things. One of the key areas of growth for the company has been rebuilding in the Middle East after the Gulf War and the invasion of Kuwait, as well as being active in South America. Where this becomes interesting is not simply the influence in the corridors of power, but the information coming from rivals British Petroleum (BP) and ESSO who at a recent government committee meeting revealed that they had agreed a division of the work following the Gulf War in Iraq before the war had happened. Not only was this evidence of price fixing, but it also strongly suggests that the decision to go to war was not necessarily purely a decision taken by politicians.

This level of influence and power being held by corporations who are not responsible to anyone but their shareholders and whose overwhelming commitment is to profit rather than ethics is at best questionable, but seems more likely to be yet another example of a part of the global conspiracy in the form of the military-industrial complex. The question that remains, and one that will be answered in upcoming posts is “Who is really controlling these corporations?” which may seem an odd question, given the power of these businesses, but if you analyse their behaviour and their choice of partners and operations you see some very odd choices that actually make little if any commercial sense, and end up costing the business rather than generating profit. You'll be amazed at the way this story develops, and just what uncovering the collusion and tracking the flow of money ends up revealing. Watch this space.