Late October has been set for the first hearing in the antitrust lawsuit alleging major manufacturers of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe, which are called converters, used the economic crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to overcharge municipal and commercial buyers of PVC pipe.
The lawsuit—George Bavolak v. Atkore Inc et al, (No. 1:24-cv-07639)—was filed Aug. 23, 2024 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, which has scheduled the first hearing in the case for Oct. 29, 2024 at 9:45 a.m., but that hearing is a “telephone hearing” in which access is limited only to the attorneys and parties involved, according to a court clerk.
The plaintiff, Bavolak, an electrical contractor, demands a jury trial and is seeking “class action” status for the contractors, cities, and others who allegedly overpaid for PVC water pipes that carry municipal drinking water from reservoirs, lakes, or rivers to treatment facilities and from there to water mains that distribute water throughout the community, and that are also used as electrical conduit pipe that protects bundled wires.
The lawsuit alleges that starting Jan. 1, 2021 and continuing to the present (which is designated as the “class period”) converter defendants Atkore Inc., Westlake Corp., and other major PVC pipe manufacturers exploited supply chain disruptions, demand fluctuations, and price volatility caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to “fix, raise, maintain, and stabilize the price of PVC municipal water pipes and PVC electrical conduit pipes” in the U.S.
The complaint alleges the defendants discussed and signaled their pricing activities through a Dow Jones company called “OPIS” that provides paying subscribers with pricing and market information in various industries. OPIS is listed as a defendant in the lawsuit saying the information company provides a product called “PVC & Pipe Weekly” that offers subscribers “access to timely information on pricing and supply/demand in the PVC pipe market,” information that is not available to non-subscribers.
The defendants are alleged to have gained access to standardized pricing data from their competitors through OPIS, and thereby collectively extracted artificially inflated profits from their customers, according to the lawsuit. “OPIS went far beyond just facilitating the private and non-public sharing of information: OPIS served again and again as a sounding board between defendants, allowing them to communicate their intentions on pricing,” thereby enabling the defendant to engage in an “antitrust conspiracy,” the lawsuit says.
In addition to Atkore Inc., Westlake Corp., and OPIS, other defendants named in the lawsuit are the converters Cantex Inc., Diamond Plastics Corp., IPEX USA LLC, JM Eagle, Inc., National Pipe & Plastics, Inc., Otter Tail Corp., Prime Conduit, Inc., and Southern Pipe, Inc.
