Following up on his FAQ for the DOJ’s newly announced Antitrust Whistleblower Rewards Program, SCL Partner Ethan Litwin spoke with MLex about how this new initiative could affect antitrust enforcement.
In the article, titled “US DOJ antitrust whistleblower program could disrupt cartels, but questions loom,” Ethan noted that cartelists’ efforts to keep their illegal behavior secret will be increasingly challenging:
Contrary to the perception that a cartel can only be kept secret by a small number of people, many cases in recent years “have a lot of people who know about it and a lot of people with information,” said Litwin, who has represented plaintiffs and defendants in cartel cases that include price-fixing litigation over generic drugs, cathode ray tubes, freight forwarding services, capacitors and financial industry lending benchmarks. “Now you’re providing them a financial incentive to report it to the government.”
“If you’re a company and you know that, you can’t hold your breath and hope that five years passes and you’re outside the statute limitations,” Litwin said. “I think the risk to companies is going to go up. By how much? That depends on how effective this new program is.”
The article was featured as the lead story on MLex’s website, which you can find here (paywall).
