Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum said on Aug. 10 he is suing the world’s biggest makers of liquid crystal display screens for engaging in a “conspiracy at the highest level” to fix prices, becoming the second U.S. state to do so, Reuters reports. The lawsuit, a civil action to be filed in a California federal court, alleges the defendants “conspired to prevent competition and to increase prices” for TFT-LCD panels, the most common form of LCD panels used in desktop monitors, laptop screens, flat-panel televisions, and other electronic devices. McCollum’s announcement came days after New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed a similar lawsuit on Aug. 6, alleging a decade of price fixing by major Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese LCD makers and by their U.S. units. “This massive conspiracy allegedly resulted in artificially and illegally inflated prices of certain LCD panels and the products that contain them at the expense of Floridians and governmental entities,” said McCollum, who—like Cuomo—is running for governor in his state. Among the defendants are well-known international LCD makers such as Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., AU Optronics Corp., Hitachi Ltd., LG Display Co., Sharp Corp., and Toshiba Corp., the Florida attorney general’s office said. It noted that some of the defendants and their employees had already been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice and had paid over $890 million in criminal fines…
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