August 2026 | SPECIAL REPORT: COMPETITION & ANTITRUST
Financier Worldwide Magazine
Antitrust agencies around the world prioritise cartel enforcement, but face a common challenge: detecting secret conspiracies to fix prices, rig bids or allocate markets.
Unlike many white-collar offences – from fraud and embezzlement to money laundering and bribery – antitrust cartels do not inherently leave financial trails or losses that raise suspicions. To crack cartels, enforcers historically relied on policies that offer leniency to companies in exchange for their self-reporting of antitrust offences.
Since the 1990s, these leniency policies uncovered countless domestic and international cartels and facilitated enforcement actions against participants, but many question whether those policies are less effective in today’s enforcement landscape.
Enforcers are now turning to new tools to detect and investigate antitrust cartels to supplement leniency. Agencies are implementing or expanding programmes offering whistleblowers financial rewards for information on antitrust offences.
They are also developing and deploying screening tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics to provide leads or to target their investigations. These efforts are expected to uncover illegal cartels, but also yield many false positives that result in costly investigations of lawful conduct.
Thus, it is imperative that companies both maintain an effective antitrust compliance programme,...
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