Okay-Line Executive Sentenced to 18-Months in U.S. Prison

Hiroshige Tanioka, an government of Japanese transport firm Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha Ltd, aka Okay-Line, pleaded responsible final week and was sentenced to 18 months in a U.S. jail for his involvement in a conspiracy to repair costs, allocate clients and rig bids of worldwide ocean transport companies for roll-on, roll-off cargo, comparable to automobiles and vans, to and from the United States and elsewhere.

The Department of Justice says Tanioka was Okay-Line’s General Manager of their automotive provider division and had, over a 14 yr interval between 1998 and 2014, “conspired to allocate customers and routes, rig bids and fix prices for the sale of international ocean shipments of roll-on, roll-off cargo to and from the United States and elsewhere, including the Port of Baltimore.”

“For more than a decade this conspiracy has raised the cost of importing cars and trucks into the United States,” stated Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer for the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division.

The DOJ notes this sentence is the primary to be imposed towards a person within the division’s ocean transport investigation. Previously, three companies have agreed to plead responsible and to pay felony fines totaling greater than $136 million, together with Tanioka’s employer Okay-Line, which was sentenced to pay a felony tremendous of $67.7 million in November 2014.

Pursuant to the plea settlement, Tanioka was sentenced to serve an 18-month jail time period and pay a $20,000 felony tremendous for his participation within the conspiracy. In addition, Tanioka has agreed to help the division in its ongoing investigation into the ocean transport business.

The DOJ says U.S. federal investigators together with the FBI and U.S. Customs and Border Protection are persevering with to peel again the layers with their investigation into value fixing, bid rigging and different anticompetitive conduct within the worldwide roll-on, roll-off ocean transport business.