On March 12, the UK's House of Lords (HoL) allowed an appeal by Ian Norris, former chief executive of the Morgan Crucible Group, against a decision of the High Court which had held that dishonest price-fixing is capable of amounting to the English common law offence of conspiracy to defraud and so is an extradition offence. The HoL remitted the case to a district judge to assess whether it would be proportional to grant an extradition request in relation to the secondary offences regarding Mr. Norris' alleged obstruction of the US criminal investigation into the cartel. The HoL held that in order for an offence to be committed, aggravating factors such as dishonesty, misrepresentation, fraud or violence must also be present and noted that there had never been a successful prosecution for being a party to, or giving effect to, a price-fixing agreement without the presence of such aggravating features. The HoL also considered the history of legislation dealing with agreements in restraint of trade. It considered that, historically, cartel agreements were not, of themselves, necessarily considered to act against the public interest. Although participation in a cartel could, in some cases, be penalized by civil remedies, it could not give rise to criminal sanctions. The HoL considered that the system of regulation whereby restrictive agreements were registrable appeared to have represented a regulatory, non-criminal code to deal with cartel agreements. It was, therefore, unlikely that Parliament could have intended that there should be an extra-statutory system involving criminal sanctions running alongside the regulatory system. However, the HoL disagreed with Mr. Norris's arguments that these offences were not extradition offences under the Extradition Act because it was not an offence under English law for him to conspire to obstruct a criminal investigation into price-fixing being carried out by a grand jury in Pennsylvania. The HoL held that price-fixing could have been combined with other elements that may have led to various offences, such as fraud. The exact outcome of an investigation could not have been determined when it was in progress. The fact that the investigation resulted in a charge of price-fixing alone was no reason to hold that it would not have been an offence under English law to obstruct the progress of an equivalent investigation by the appropriate body in the UK.
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