Two South Korean executives and an American were indicted on charges of price-fixing and bid-rigging in the DRAM memory chip industry, the U.S. Justice Department said Wednesday.
The indictment filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco charged Kim Il-ung and Rha Young-bae of Samsung Electronics and Gary Swanson of Hynix America with conspiring from April 2001 to June 2002 to fix prices of DRAMs by exchanging information and making agreements through meetings and phone calls.
Kim and Rha are South Korean citizens. Swanson is a U.S. citizen.
Kim was vice president of marketing at Samsung at the time, and Rha vice president of sales and marketing. Swanson was senior vice president of sales and marketing for Hynix America, the U.S.-based subsidiary of Hynix Semiconductor.
The two companies are the world's largest and second largest manufacturers of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips, the most commonly used semiconductor product that provides high-speed storage and retrieval of electronic information.
Four other Samsung executives pleaded guilty to DRAM price-fixing earlier this year and agreed to serve prison terms ranging from seven to eight months and pay US$250,000 in fines.
Four Hynix executives were also charged in a price-fixing conspiracy and fined the same amount with jail terms of between five and eight months.
"Including today's charge, four companies and 16 individuals have been charged, and fines totaling more than $731 million have resulted from the department's ongoing antitrust investigation into the DRAM industry," the department said.
"The antitrust division will vigorously pursue individuals who engage in criminal cartel conspiracies," said Thomas O. Barnett, assistant attorney general.
Washington, Oct. 18 (Yonhap News)
Samsung, Hynix executives indicted on DRAM price-fixing charges |
