If you buy roses on Valentine’s Day anywhere in the world, chances are that the flowers have flown by air cargo from a place like Kenya or Colombia. If you bought those roses between 1999 and 2006, the airline likely overcharged the florist by 510 percent for shipping. Little overcharges like these are the stuff of big class actions wherever class actions can be brought. The riddle of the air cargo cartel is whether effective mass actions can be transported to Europe.
It was coincidentally on Valentine’s Day 2006 that regulators launched dawn raids with military precision on nearly all the world’s major airlines, to search for evidence of collusion. In the years since, the U.S. Department of Justice has fined freight carriers more than $1.7 billionand U.S. victims have won $500 million in early settlements. The European Commission has fined the airlines more than $1 billion. So where is the payout for European victims? It’s coming.
