Hello and welcome to this MLEX podcast. I'm Laurel Henning, senior correspondent based in Sydney, Australia.

And today we're looking at a recent increase in court action here in Australia over cartel conduct, both in criminal and civil cases.

Just in the last fortnight, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, or ACCC, added two more cases to its hit list.

One against Norwegian shipping line, Wallaneous Wilhelmson Ocean, or WWO, and a second against an Australian

company, Blue Scope Steel. The first one of those was a criminal prosecution, the second,

a civil matter, at least for now. I've been following the recent developments with my colleague

James Panicki, Emlex's Australasian managing editor, who joins me now from Melbourne. Hello, James.

Hello, Laurel.

We'll talk about WWO in just a moment, but first, Blue Scope, an Australian steel company and its former

manager of general sales and marketing, Jason Ellis, are facing civil proceedings over allegations

of price fixing for flat steel products. James, what do we need to know?

Okay, look, we need to know that there's been a flurry of activity on the part of the ACC

in recent, over the recent year or so, particularly in the case of criminal cartel prosecutions.

And there's been a flurry of activity, needless to say, on the part of Australia's federal prosecutor,

which is responsible for bringing this kind of court action. In the case of the case of Blue Scope

is really just the latest. We covered this late last week, and it is, as you mentioned, a civil case,

not a criminal prosecution, but it's also a bit of an unusual case. Now, the

allegations are that the company had attempted to induce various steel distributors in Australia,

as well as foreign manufacturers, to enter into what the ACCC has very carefully described as

agreements containing a price-fixing provision for flat steel products.

So in other words, the allegation isn't that the company had successfully established a cartel,

but that it had made attempts to do so. Yes, that's right. And the company made that point very

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