Defending “The Last Man Standing”: Trench Lessons from the 2008 Criminal Antitrust Trial (United States v. Swanson)

by Robert H. Bunzel (co-author)

June 2008 – Gary Swanson, a senior sales executive of Hynix America, was indicted for conspiring to fix Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) computer chip prices in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. . . . The government investigation of the DRAM cartel began in early 2002, and by the time of the Swanson trial, four companies, Samsung, Infineon Technologies, Hynix, and Elpida Memory, and fourteen out of sixteen “carved out” individuals, had pled guilty resulting in fines and penalties of over $731 million. The four-week trial ended with a hung jury, and a mistrial was declared on March 6, 2008, after seven days of deliberations.  View a pdf copy of the article.