An executive of Tokyo-based Yazaki Corporation pled guilty for his role in a conspiracy to fix prices of instrument panel clusters today in a U.S. District court in Detroit. Toshio Sudo from Japan is the 11th executive to be charged in the government’s ongoing investigation into price fixing and bid rigging in the auto parts industry. Yazaki manufactures and sells a variety of automotive parts, and is a major supplier to Japanese automakers, among other firms.
The sweeping investigation, which is ongoing, has implicated some of the industry’s largest suppliers, most of them Japanese.
According to the plea deal, Sudo has agreed to serve 14 months in a U.S. prison, to pay a $20,000 criminal fine and to cooperate with the department’s investigation – subject to almost certain court approval. Sudo’s involvement in the conspiracy lasted from at least as early as January 2003 until at least February 2009.
The Department of Justice said that Sudo and his co-conspirators carried out the price fixing crime by agreeing during meetings and conversations to allocate the supply of instrument panel clusters and sell the parts at noncompetitive prices to unnamed automakers in the United States and elsewhere.
“From using code names with one another, to meeting in remote or private locations, the conspirators employed a variety of measures to keep their illegal conduct secret,” said Scott D. Hammond, Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Antitrust Division’s criminal enforcement program at the Justice Department.
Including Sudo, seven companies and 11 executives have now been charged in the department’s ongoing investigation into price fixing and bid rigging auto parts. Furukawa Electric Co. Ltd, Denso Corp., Yazaki Corp., G.S. Electech Inc., Fujikura Ltd. and Autoliv Inc. all pleaded guilty and were sentenced to pay a total of more than $785 million in criminal fines. TRW Deutschland Holding GmbH has also agreed to plead guilty.
Seven of the individuals involved – Junichi Funo, Hirotsugu Nagata, Tetsuya Ukai, Tsuneaki Hanamura, Ryoki Kawai, Shigeru Ogawa and Hisamitsu Takada – have been sentenced to pay criminal fines and to serve jail sentences ranging from a year and a day to two years each. Makoto Hattori and Norihiro Imai have pleaded guilty and await sentencing. Kazuhiko Kashimoto is scheduled to plead guilty on 26 September 2012.
Sudo is charged with price fixing in violation of the Sherman Act, which carries a maximum sentence for individuals of 10 years and a fine of $1 million. The maximum fine for an individual may be increased to twice the gain derived from the crime or twice the loss suffered by the victims of the crime, if either of those amounts is greater than the statutory maximum fine.
Critics of the deal note the deep discounting of the fines and jail time. Proponents note the ever expanding scope of the price rigging investigation, enabled in part by such plea deals that require cooperation with government investigators.
