Germany’s Federal Cartel Authority has found that some of the most successful sausage producers have colluded for decades to manipulate prices of sausages and related products.

The cartel has been dubbed the “Atlantic Circle” – after the Hotel Atlantic in Hamburg where the sausage producers first met. According to the cartel authority, 21 producers and 33 individuals will share the fine.

“These price agreements have been practised for many years,” said Andreas Mundt, president of the cartel authority. “The total penalty seems high at first glance but makes sense against the backdrop of the large number of companies involved, the duration of the cartel and the billions in sales earned in the market.”

The sausage fines come as the German competition authority flexes its muscles, in a record year of fines, which have been imposed on international as well as domestic companies.

The size of the fine may also reflect the special place pork has in German cuisine. It is by far the most popular meat, with Germans consuming on average 38kg of pig meat each in 2012, according to the meat industry association – equivalent to 380 Bratwurst a year. That compares with just 11kg of poultry and 9kg of beef per capita. Of the 8.8m tonnes of meat produced in Germany in 2012, 5.5m tonnes were pork.

The cartel office said it was tipped off about the price-fixing. Eleven companies co-operated, which helped to reduce their fines; other companies face individual fines running into the high millions.

The list of sausage makers includes some of the best-known producers – including Böklunder, Wiesenhof and Rügenwalder.

The country’s largest sausage producer, Zur-Mühlen-Gruppe, which owns the Böklunder and Könecke brands, said on Tuesday it planned to contest the fines and denied the allegations of price fixing.

While cow, sheep and goat meat production has fallen in Germany in the past decade, pork production has gone up from 3.9m tonnes in 2001 to just over 5m tonnes last year, according to the German Meat Association.

Yet the number of craft butchers has been falling as family-owned businesses find it difficult to attract workers, and discount supermarkets such as Lidl and Edeka take their toll. At the end of 2012 there were 14,372 butcher shops across the country, according to the German Butchers’ Association – down from nearly 16,000 in 2010.

The sausage fines are the latest penalty to be announced this year by the Federal Cartel Authority against retail producers in Germany. Eleven breweries – including the Danish brewer Carlsberg – were hit with total charges of €338m for fixing prices this year.

In February, Germany’s three largest sugar producers were fined €280m for price fixing by the cartel office.

The authority has imposed fines of €900m this year, compared with total fines of just €240m in 2013.

(Published by Financial Times – July 15, 2014)