A Pennsylvania rigging company was charged today by the Department of Justice with conspiring to rig bids and to allocate certain customers for bridge inspection and structural rigging services.

In a one-count felony charge filed in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Department's Antitrust Division charged Pittsburgh Rigging Company, Inc. of Clinton, Pennsylvania with conspiring to allocate certain customers and rig bids to those customers for services -- which typically include providing manpower, traffic control, and boom and bucket trucks for bridge inspection sites. The Department said the conspiracy, which violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act, took place from September 1993 through September 1995.

According to the charge, the company conspired with another rigging company to suppress and eliminate competition for bridge inspection and structural rigging services by discussing and allocating bids to certain customers before those bids were submitted to project owners or general contractors.

Joel I. Klein, Acting Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division, and Frederick W. Thieman, United States Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, said the charges resulted from a grand jury investigation of bid rigging and customer allocation in the bridge inspection and structural rigging services industry. The case was filed by the Antitrust Division's Philadelphia Field Office with the assistance of the Pittsburgh branch office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The maximum penalty for a company convicted of a violation of the Sherman Act is a fine of $10 million, twice the pecuniary gain the corporation derived from the crime, or twice the pecuniary loss suffered by the victims of the crime, whichever is greater.

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