The US Justice Department announced on 16 July 2013 that Japanese company Diamond Electric Manufacturing (Diamond Electric) has agreed to plead guilty and pay a USD19 million fine for fixing the prices of ignition coils in cars sold in the United States. Takayoshi Matsunaga, an executive from the Swedish company Autoliv, has also agreed to plead guilty in relation to price fixing of seat belts sold to Toyota for installation in cars made and sold in the United States.

Diamond Electric, which has agreed to cooperate with the ongoing investigation, is the tenth auto-parts maker to plead guilty in the Justice Department’s long-running investigation into price fixing, bid-rigging and other anticompetitive conduct in the automotive parts industry. The cartel ran from July 2003 to February 2010 and this is the first case in the investigation involving parts sold directly to a company headquartered in the United States – Ford. Parts were also sold to Toyota and Fuji Heavy Industries, the parent company of Subaru.

Diamond Electric has apologised for its conduct and has stated that it has created a compliance programme and introduced strict new policies relating to pricing activities to ensure that there is no repeat of the anticompetitive behaviour.

Matsunaga, a Japanese national, has been handed a prison sentence of one year and day and a USD20,000 fine. He is the fifteenth executive to plead guilty during the probe. Autoliv itself agreed to plead guilty in June 2012 and was fined USD14.5 million. Felony counts have now been filed in relation to price fixing in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and both agreements are subject to court approval.

To date the investigation has cost the ten companies and fifteen executives USD828 million in criminal fines. Investigations into price fixing of parts in the automotive industry are also underway in Europe, Australia, Korea, Japan and Canada. On 10 July 2013, the EU Competition Commission fined four wire harness suppliers a total of EU141.8 million for taking part in cartels that covered the whole European Economic Area.