Justices Doubt Japan Firms Conspired to Dump Goods

The Supreme Court today spared Japanese manufacturers, at least temporarily, from having to defend themselves at trial against charges they conspired to illegally “dump” electronic products in this country at artificially lowered prices.

By a 5-4 vote, the justices said a federal appeals court was wrong when, in 1983, it ordered a trial in a 16-year-old antitrust lawsuit in which Zenith and other U.S. makers of electronic products are seeking billions of dollars from their Japanese competitors.

The lawsuit, alleging a 20-year-old illegal conspiracy, now returns to the Philadelphia-based U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals for further proceedings.

Led by Justice Lewis F. Powell, the high court noted that the alleged conspiracy among Sanyo Electric Co., Hitachi Ltd., Toshiba Corp., Mitsubishi Electric Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Sharp Corp., their trading companies and U.S. subsidiaries has failed “to achieve its ends in the two decades of its asserted operation.”

Powell said such a failure “is strong evidence that the conspiracy does not in fact exist.”

The court said there was not enough proof of a conspiracy for the 3rd Circuit Court to order a trial after the Japanese manufacturers requested that the lawsuit be dismissed.

Sending the case back, the justices said, “The Court of Appeals is free to consider whether there is other evidence that is sufficiently unambiguous to permit a trier of fact to find that (the Japanese manufacturers) conspired to price predatorily for two decades despite the absence of any apparent motive to do so.”