Northcliffe Newspapers, a subsidiary of Daily Mail and General Trust, has been fined £1.3 million by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) for predatory pricing by its Aberdeen Journals division.
John Vickers, director general of OFT, commented: “Aberdeen Journals deliberately incurred losses in a persistent campaign to remove its only direct rival from the market. This campaign continued despite the fact that the Competition Act 1998 prohibited predatory pricing from March 2000 and despite an OFT investigation already being in train. This was a serious infringement of the law, and the penalty should act as a deterrent to others.”
The decision marks the end of a long running saga which saw the original case against Northcliffe Newspapers thrown out after it was decided that the premise on which the OFT had based its decision was not sufficiently defined. The original investigation was triggered by complaints from a weekly free newspaper, the Aberdeen and District Independent which accused the Aberdeen Journals of acting unlawfully by undercutting its advertising prices.
The OFT agreed with the accusations against the Aberdeen Journal, finding that the company had deliberately incurred losses through under-selling its only direct rival in the market.
