www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/10/13/samsung.price.fixing.ap/index.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Samsung, the world's largest maker of memory chips for computers and other electronic gadgets, has agreed to plea guilty to pr ice fixing and pay a $300 million fine, US officials said Thursday. The guilty plea to the single felony charge by South Korea-based Samsung Electronics Co. The government's acting antitrust chief, Thomas O Barnett, said seven Sa msung employees were not protected by the guilty plea, an indication the y may individually face criminal antitrust charges. "That's a decision for us to make moving forward," Barnett said. He added that prosecuting individuals -- not just companies in price-fixing case s is an important deterrent against similar abuses. The Justice Department already has secured similar guilty pleas from two other companies and collected more than $345 million in fines. "Price-fixing threatens our free market system, stifles innovation and ro bs American consumers of the benefit of competitive prices," Attorney Ge neral Alberto Gonzales said. Samsung said in a statement the company "strongly supports fair competiti on and ethical practices and forbids anti-competitive behavior." A spoke swoman, Chris Goodhart, declined to identify the seven employees or say whether they still worked for Samsung. Samsung received grand jury subpoenas in connection with the investigatio n during 2002, and put aside $100 million late last year to pay potentia l criminal penalties. Samsung's top competitor, Seoul-based Hynix, agreed earlier this year to plead guilty to price fixing and pay a $185 million fine. Last September , rival Infineon Technologies AG of Germany agreed to a $160 million fin e Another competitor, Micron Technology Inc. of Boise, Idaho, has been cooperating with prosecutors and was not expected to face charges. The government accused the companies of conspiring in e-mails, telephone calls and face-to-face meetings to fix prices of memory chips between Ap ril 1999 and June 2002. The chips are used in digital recorders, personal computers, printers, vi deo recorders, mobile phones and many other electronics. Barrett said Apple an d Dell raised computer prices to compensate, and other companies respond ed by reducing the amount of memory installed in computers they sold but kept consumer prices the same. The investigation started in 2002, a year after memory chip prices began to climb even though the high-tech industry was in a tailspin. At the ti me, the hikes were attributed to tight supplies, although then-Dell Comp uter CEO Michael Dell blamed them on cartel-like behavior by chip makers .
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