Tesco, the United Kingdom’s largest retailer, has filed an antitrust lawsuit against eight Norwegian salmon producers, alleging price fixing.
Filed on 18 Feburary 2025 through the High Court in London, the lawsuit names Cermaq Group, Lerøy Seafood Group, Scottish Sea Farms, Bremnes Seashore, Grieg Seafood, Grieg Seafood UK, SalMar, and Sjór as defendants.
The suit also names Tesco subsidiaries Booker, Booker Direct, Budgens Stores, Booker Retail Partners (GB), and Marko Self Service Wholesalers as claimants.
Claims of salmon price fixing have dogged the Norwegian salmon industry for years, and there were a number of suits filed on behalf of retailers and consumers in 2024.
Tesco chose not to join one such suit, brought by several other major U.K. retailers in March 2024, against six Norwegian salmon producers, which tied GBP 675 million (USD 853 million, EUR 816 million) in losses to alleged price fixing.
A class-action suit, filed on behalf of U.K. consumers, is also pending; that suit seeks GBP 382 million (USD 483 million, EUR 462 million) for price fixing that allegedly occurred between 2015 and 2019.
In a release about the latter filing, Waterside Class Limited, the company which filed the suit, said that because retailers passed high salmon prices on to consumers, “much of the damage caused by alleged price fixing has ultimately been suffered by consumers rather than retailers.”
Last year also brought major developments in a years’ long investigation by the European Commission (E.C.) regarding alleged salmon price fixing by Cermaq, Grieg Seafood, Bremnes, Lerøy, Mowi, and Salmar.
In January 2024, the E.C. announced that it was advancing an investigation into price fixing by the companies, stating its “concerns that, between 2011 and 2019, [salmon producers] exchanged commercially sensitive information, relating to sales prices, available volumes, sales volumes, production volumes, and production capacities, as well as other price-setting factors.”
According to the trade watchdog’s press release on the topic, “the suspected aim of this alleged conduct was to reduce normal uncertainty in the market for spot sales of Norwegian farmed Atlantic salmon to the E.U.”
In September 2024, the E.C. held a three-day hearing on the issue, which brought together company representatives and senior antitrust officials.
Plaintiff and claimant antitrust lawyer David Scott, managing partner of Scott+Scott, told SeafoodSource in May 2024 that he thought any case filed against Norwegian producers “could get messy.”
Scott pointed out that European countries have no standardized class-action recognition, so if the E.C. investigation ultimately deteremined price fixing, the civil litigation that would follow would happen on a country-to-country basis. He also explained that compensation in European cases would operate differently than they do in the U.S.
“This is not like a U.S.-style class-action, where a large number of people are collecting small amounts of money. In our cases, there is often significant money coming back to these corporations that have been victims,” Scott said.
