The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has imposed fines totalling £129.5m on 103 construction firms in England which it ruled had colluded with competitors on building contracts.??

The heaviest fine (£17.9m) was handed out to contractor Kier, while Interserve (£11.6m), Balfour Beatty (£5.2m), Carillion (£5.4m), John Sisk (£6.2m), Connaught (£5.6m) and Galliford Try (£8.3m) were also fined.

The decision follows an OFT Statement of Objections in April last year after a Competition Act investigation.??

The OFT concluded that the firms engaged in illegal anti-competitive bid-rigging activities on 199 tenders from 2000 to 2006, mostly in the form of ‘cover pricing’,  where one or more bidders in a tender process obtains an artificially high price from a competitor.

The OFT said it also uncovered six instances where successful bidders had paid an agreed sum of money to the unsuccessful bidder (known as a ‘compensation payment’). These payments of between £2,500 and £60,000 were facilitated by the creation of false invoices.??

Of the 103 firms, 86 received reductions in their penalties because they admitted their involvement in cover pricing before the decision was made.??