BURLINGTON, Vt. -- Four fuel jobbers targeted in a class-action lawsuit for price fixing have asked a judge to dismiss it.
The lawsuit, filed this past June by law firms Bailey Glasser LLP of Washington, D.C., and The Burlington Law Practice PLLC, charges four Vermont fuel wholesalers with “conspiring to fix the price of gas at artificially high levels.”
The lawsuit alleges that the distributors—St. Albans, Vt.-based R.L. Vallee Inc. and SB Collins Inc., and South Burlington, Vt.-based Champlain Farms/Wesco Inc. and Champlain Inc. (Champlain Oil)—matched up their wholesale fuel prices, which in turn caused retail fuel prices in Chittenden and nearby Vermont counties to rise at both the stations they owned and those they supplied. The result is that they illegally profited more than $100 million over the past 10 years, according to the lawsuit.
The suit has been filed on behalf of “all citizens and businesses of the state of Vermont who purchased unleaded gasoline from June 1, 2005, to the present, either from any gasoline station owned by the defendants in the class area or from any gasoline station the defendants supplied at wholesale in the class area.” It seeks restitution, compensatory and punitive damages of an unspecified amount, and asks for treble damages as allowed under the law.
In October, the wholesaler defendants filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit last month. Tris Coffin, an attorney at Downs Rachlin Martin PLLC, Burlington, Vt., which represents the jobbers, told Burlington Free Press he “can’t really comment much” on the case. “All I can tell you is in our view the case has no merit.”
R.L. Vallee, in its motion to dismiss the lawsuit, argues that the plaintiffs failed to provide any evidence supporting price fixing.
“While Plaintiffs claim in conclusory, and cloak and dagger, fashion that Defendants formed a cabal through ‘'secret meetings and conversations, often at undisclosed, out-of-the-way locations’ to conspire to fix gasoline prices, Plaintiffs conspicuously fail to allege any facts in the Complaint of these meeting and conversations—no dates, times, places, participants, discussions, or outcomes,” the motion states. “That is because those meetings and conversations never took place.”
Michael Murphy, an attorney at Bailey Glasser, accused the jobbers of attempting to jump “to the end” of the lawsuit.
“The question now is purely whether we made a case that has met the threshold for pleading an antitrust case in Vermont,” Murphy told the newspaper. In the plaintiffs’ own reply to the motion to dismiss, they argue the defendants have not justified their pricing behavior.
“Put simply, the evidence does not support the possibility of innocent, independent pricing decisions and instead points directly to an extensive price-fixing scheme of long duration perpetrated by the Defendants,” it states.
Several investigations and hearings have looked into high gas prices in Chittenden, Franklin and Grand Isle counties. This includes a study by the Federal Trade Commission and an investigation by a Senate energy committee. The FTC study concluded that gas prices in Greater Burlington in late June 2012 were 10 to 43 cents per gallon higher than reliable computer models would predict. According to the plaintiffs’ law firms, the four wholesalers have about 64% market share of the retail gas stations in the three northwestern counties and dominate the wholesale market.
Coffin told Burlington Free Press that the fuel distributors have a Dec. 11 deadline to file an additional brief on the motion to dismiss. From here, a Chittenden Superior Court judge will determine whether or not the case can move forward.
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