Penalties for competition infringements rocket

The Office of Fair Trading has published new guidance on penalties (press release here) under which the amount of a financial penalty for breaching the prohibitions in the Competition Act 1998 goes up from a hefty maximum 10 per cent of "relevant turnover" to 30 per cent. When the Act first came into operation, which to me still seems quite recently, the then Director General of Fair Trading, John Bridgman, told a seminar I attended that the penalties would be "eye-watering". The new maximum sounds as if it would cause blood to flow ... The redeeming feature remains that the penalty has to be proportionate to the seriousness of the breach and the damage it causes, and it is rare for a penalty to come anywhere near the maximum, and then only in flagrant cases of price-fixing, market sharing or predatory pricing.