P&G and Unilever Ran a Detergent Cartel — and the EU Fined Them €315 Million

Editor's note: an earlier version of this piece wrongly stated that eight companies were fined and named Colgate as a participant. The Commission's decision covered three companies — Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Henkel (which received immunity as the whistleblower). Colgate-Palmolive was not part of this case.

On April 13, 2011, the European Commission fined Procter & Gamble €211.2 million and Unilever €104 million — a combined €315.2 million — for operating a price-fixing cartel in heavy-duty laundry powder across eight EU countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands.

The cartel ran from January 2002 to March 2005. The three participants — P&G, Unilever, and Henkel — coordinated pricing strategies and shared commercially sensitive information, using the kind of clandestine arrangements — secret meetings, careful communications — designed to avoid detection. These were companies that spend hundreds of millions annually on advertising emphasizing product differentiation and competitive superiority, while privately ensuring that competition did not drive down the prices they could charge.

Henkel paid nothing. Under the Commission's leniency program, the first cartel member to come forward with evidence receives full immunity — an incentive structure designed to destabilize cartels from within. It worked exactly as intended: Henkel's disclosure triggered the investigation that cost its co-conspirators over €300 million.

The fines were calculated as a percentage of each company's sales in the affected markets, with reductions for cooperation. For consumers, the harm was diffuse but real: households across eight countries paid more for an everyday necessity than a competitive market would have produced, with the excess extracted through coordination rather than innovation or efficiency.

The case reinforced the Commission's reputation as the world's most aggressive antitrust regulator — willing to pursue the biggest consumer-goods multinationals on the planet and make the penalties hurt.