Corporate & Securities Law

DOJ Releases Its Amensty Letters

By David Fischer

Today, the U.S. Department released redacted copies of its leniency (amnesty) letters.  DOJ explains that it did not want to release the letters but:

in light of the Court’s opinion in FOIA litigation titled Stolt-Nielsen Transportation Group Ltd. v. United States, 534 F.3d 728 (D.C. Cir. 2008), and the settlement agreement reached by the parties, the Division has released redacted copies of its leniency (amnesty) letters to its FOIA electronic reading room to give the pubic equal access to the terms and conditions of the letters.

In addition to redacting “(1) names, titles and other personal and corporate identifiers; (2) dates and temporal information; (3) industries; (4) miscellaneous identifiers and confidential source provided information; (5) geographic information; and (6) specific cartel conduct and offense descript” DOJ also “arranged” the letters:

in random, non-chronological order within two groups or batches. The first batch of letters spans the period from the August 10, 1993 issuance of the Division’s Corporate Leniency Policy until the Division’s announcement of a model leniency letter on April 1, 1998. The second batch of letters spans the period from April 1,1998 until the Division issued a set of revised model leniency letters on November 19, 2008. The Division conducted a reasonable search for leniency letters and has released all the letters it located that were dated before November 19, 2008.

In order to mitigate concerns that the identity of specific leniency applicants or the information provided by applicants could be determined, even with redactions, the Division is able to release redacted leniency letters in large batches only, such as the groups of letters below. Additional large batches of redacted leniency letters will be added to the Web site at future intervals.

You can see the letters on the DOJ website.

[Note: all the above quotes, including links, are from the DOJ website.]

Full post as published by Antitrust Review on February 05, 2009 (boomark / email).