Editor's Comment: Yet another cartel

The last week has seen yet another construction industry cartel brought to justice, with Poland's Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (OCCP) announcing fines of almost € 100 million for seven cement manufacturers.

Cartels in the industry are nothing new, but the fact that they keep being unearthed or, as was the case in Poland, reported by a ‘whistleblower' from within the group, undermines any claims the industry tries to make that it has cleaned up its act. It's a bit like the use of performance enhancing drugs in sports - each new scandal brings new testing regimes and closer monitoring of athletes but do you really believe there will never be another drugs story in say the Tour de France?

Construction companies today have extensive codes of conduct and do a lot of training and awareness programmes to educate their employees about what constitutes illegal anti-competitive behaviour, and yet they continue to break these laws and suffer heavy fines as a result. Just like drugs in sports, do you really believe there will never be another construction cartel prosecuted in Europe?

This raises the question of why? Is the temptation to raise profits by colluding with competitors just too much for managers to resist? - Despite company policies and the fact that if discovered they would probably lose their jobs. Is it about greed or are the pressures on managers to deliver profit and profit growth so severe that they break the law out of desperation? Companies may have ethical standards and training in place, but every new case shows that they are not strong enough.

I recognise that this is a difficult problem to crack. We are talking about companies with hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide, and there are obvious logistical challenges in getting policies that are decided in the boardroom to work on the ground in distant parts of the world. Even if policies are well communicated and all staff are trained and made aware of them, there is always a risk that a rouge employee will act illegally.

But the fact remains that the industry needs to do better. Every new cartel damages its reputation and makes claims of working to solid ethical standards sound increasingly hollow. The unfortunate knock-on effect of this is that even if the industry became 100% clean, how could it prove this? You cannot prove a negative - that there are no cartels in construction - just as you cannot prove there are no drugs in sport.

But what the industry can do is put more effort into stamping out collusion. If it does this, the prosecutions will become fewer and farther between and peoples' perception of the industry will improve.