EU May Fine Vitamin Firms in Price Fixing

BRUSSELS — Roche Holding and BASF, which last week agreed to pay record U.S. fines totaling $725 million for conspiring to fix global vitamin prices, may also face stiff European Union fines, EU Competition Commissioner Karel Van Miert suggested.

A resolution to the EU’s own investigation is still months away, however, and Van Miert would not say which companies the EU may fine.

Roche, Europe’s fourth-biggest drug maker, agreed last week to pay $500 million--the largest U.S. criminal fine ever--and Germany’s BASF, Europe’s biggest chemical company, was fined $225 million. A third vitamin maker, France’s Rhone-Poulenc, escaped a fine by cooperating with the investigation.

Van Miert, the EU’s top antitrust official, said the EU will probably impose fines before the end of the year.

“This kind of cartel needs to be fined very heavily,” Van Miert told reporters, without saying how EU penalties would compare with the U.S. fines. Shares of Basel, Switzerland-based Roche have plunged to a five-month low.

The U.S. Justice Department, which conducted a two-year investigation, said Roche, BASF and Rhone-Poulenc conspired for nine years to raise the prices of vitamins and some related products, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in extra revenue. Those nutrients, part of a $20-billion world vitamin market, are used in a variety of products from animal feed to groceries.

EU regulators, like their U.S. counterparts, reduce fines for companies that agree to cooperate with investigations.

Van Miert said that “some companies” are cooperating with the EU’s vitamin-cartel inquiry, but he declined to name them.