A cartel follow-on damages claim.
- 01£480mAmount claimed
- 023Expert reports filed
- 039 yearsCartel period analysed
- 04CATSpecialist tribunal
Our team was appointed by claimant’s counsel to quantify the overcharge paid on industrial chemical inputs following a European cartel decision—a claim turning on the econometric counterfactual and how much of the overcharge had been passed on downstream.
The question
A prior infringement decision had established liability, leaving quantum as the battleground. The tribunal needed to know what prices would have been absent the cartel, and whether the claimant had absorbed the overcharge or recovered it from its own customers through higher product prices.
Our approach
We estimated a before-and-after regression on nine years of transaction data, controlling for feedstock costs, capacity and demand. A separate pass-on analysis traced input costs through the claimant’s pricing, distinguishing contract customers from spot sales to test where the overcharge actually came to rest.
The evidence
The defendants’ experts argued for a near-zero overcharge using a shorter benchmark window. Under cross-examination, we showed their results were driven by a single anomalous quarter; removing it brought the two models within a narrow range and left pass-on as the principal remaining issue.
The outcome
The tribunal accepted our overcharge methodology and applied a modest pass-on adjustment consistent with our contract-customer analysis. The parties then settled the outstanding claims against the other cartelists on terms that closely tracked the judgment’s approach.
An overcharge estimate is only as strong as the benchmark it is measured against.