New Panel To Advise On Antitrust Issues

Attorney General Janet Reno set up a panel to give advice on policing price-fixing and mergers in a global economy where she said international cartels “cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars a year.”

Assistant Attorney General Joel I. Klein, head of the antitrust division, said the 12-member panel would produce “one or more white papers charting a proposed role for the Department of Justice in international competition and antitrust enforcement” with “real, practical suggestions” for unilateral, bilateral and multilateral efforts.

The panel of business leaders, scholars and former regulators will be co-chaired by James Rill, who headed the antitrust division during the Ford administration, and Paula Stern, ex-chairwoman of the U.S. International Trade Commission.

Klein told a news conference Monday that when Rill left the division for private legal practice in 1993, about 5 percent of its work involved international cases. Now, Klein said, that figure is 25 percent to 33 percent and growing.

Klein noted, as he has before, that two dozen federal grand juries are investigating international price-fixing. He pointed to the division’s work with European regulators in approving Boeing’s acquisition of McDonnell Douglas. And he said the division had forwarded evidence to European enforcers about allegations that a European-based computer airline reservation system was withholding key information from the U.S.-based Sabre reservation system.