A Minnesota electrical contractor has sued U.S. PVC pipe manufacturers for what it claims is “price fixing” and is seeking to convert the case into a class action.

Price fixing is an illegal practice in which several companies, which should be competing with each other, set a common price for their products or services instead of allowing the market to determine them.

In this regard, George Bavolak, of Minneapolis, and former owner of Metropolitan Energy Service Inc., a residential and commercial electric service provider, filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.

An action against pipe manufacturers

The complaint filed is against a group of pipe companies that together control about 90% of the wholesale market for PVC municipal water pipe and 95% of the wholesale market for PVC electrical conduit in the United States.

The defendants include Atkore Inc., Cantex Inc., Diamond Plastics Corp., Ipex USA LLC, JM Eagle, National Pipe and Plastics Inc., Otter Tail Corp., Prime Conduit Inc., Southern Pine Inc. and Westlake Corp., the suit states.

The plaintiff alleges that the companies “conspired and combined to fix, increase, maintain and stabilize the price of PVC municipal water pipe and PVC electrical conduit pipe (collectively, ‘PVC pipe’) in the United States.”

Bavolak claims that he suffered financial “harm” as a result. It wants the lawsuit to include “all persons and entities that purchased municipal PVC water pipe or PVC electrical conduit indirectly for end use” from the defendants in the United States since at least January 1, 2021.

Beyond the pandemic

The lawsuit alleges that the COVID-19 pandemic “provided defendants with an opportunity to implement their conspiracy” and that they used OPIS, a market research and information service, “to exchange price signaling statements and competitively sensitive information.”