Corrugated cardboard boxes (Spain)

On 18 June 2015, the Spanish Competition Authority (CNMC in Spanish) issued a decision imposing administrative fines totalling EUR 57,686,187 on 18 companies active in the manufacture of paper for corrugated cardboard, corrugated cardboard itself and corrugated cardboard packaging, as well as on a trade association, for breaching Spanish and EU competition law. Although the decision was annulled by judgments of the Spanish Audiencia Nacional handed down between December 2018 and January 2019, the annulment was due to the expiry of the statutory deadline for completing the administrative proceedings, and the court did not ultimately rule on the merits concerning the existence and scope of the cartel.

According to the CNMC decision, the investigated anticompetitive practices constituted a single and continuous infringement of Article 1 of Act No. 5/2007, of 3 July, on the Defence of Competition (LDC in Spanish) and Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, between at least January 2002 and May 2013, qualifying as a cartel, consisting of:

• In the Spanish paper market, through the trade association, the issuance of collective recommendations on paper price increases and the coordination of responses to a European magazine for the compilation of the benchmark price index.
• In the Spanish corrugated cardboard markets, multilateral and bilateral price-fixing, customer-allocation and information-sharing practices.