http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/31/bu...ce-fixing.html
Quote:
The response from Macmillan addresses one of the more colorful charges by the government: that the publishers met privately over dinner in upscale restaurants to discuss their conspiracy.
John Sargent, Macmillan’s chief executive, “dined once or at most twice with peers from certain other publishing houses, but these dinners were social in nature,” Macmillan said in its filing. “No conspiracy was hatched over any such dinner.”
John Makinson, the chief executive of Penguin Group, had a “social dinner” on Jan. 28, 2009, Penguin’s filing said, but while “general book industry issues and trends were discussed at high-levels of generality, Makinson did so pursuant to antitrust legal advice and avoided competitively sensitive topics like terms of trade, prices or confidential competitive matters.”
Addressing the charge that Macmillan conspired with other publishers in late 2009 and early 2010, the filing from Macmillan said that no telephone conversation between Mr. Sargent and other publishers had involved collusion. “Indeed, more than half of these telephone ‘conversations’ lasted no more than a few seconds and were nothing more than missed calls,” the filing said.
|
If half of the telephone conversations lasted no more than a few seconds, what about the other half?