[T]he plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging gasoline price-fixing scored a victory in court recently with a judge ordering the gasoline dealers to turn over additional internal communications.
Chittenden Superior Court Judge Robert Mello ordered the gasoline dealers to provide emails and other correspondence between themselves and two trade associations that Mello said provided an avenue for collusion on prices.
In a decision released Thursday, Mello noted the four defendants are members of the Vermont Petroleum Association and the Vermont Retail and Grocers Association.
Mello supported claims by the plaintiffs that the gas wholesalers decreased their prices during legislative hearings looking into the issue in Montpelier.
“The court found the timing of the price changes to be ‘highly suspicious and suggest(ive of) an agreement to temporarily reduce prices in order to mask high prices charged at other times,” the judge said. The petroleum and grocers associations have lobbyists at the Statehouse, so communications between the defendants and the trade groups were “relevant” to the plaintiffs’ claims.
“The requested responses would make the question of whether Defendants conspired to fix prices more or less probable,” Mello wrote.
The class-action lawsuit asserts that R.L. Vallee Inc., S.B. Collins Inc., Wesco Inc. and Champlain Oil Co. conspired to use their collective market power to realize more than $100 million in illegal profits by keeping gas prices artificially high in Chittenden, Franklin and Grand Isle counties.
The suit is being brought on behalf of six northwestern Vermont residents, though a West Virginia law firm has sought to broaden the number of residents in the case. The defendants, who collectively supply more than 100 gas stations, have denied any collusion.
Almost one year ago, the Vermont Supreme Court rejected an appeal from the wholesalers seeking to toss out the class-action suit.
In a reaction to the latest ruling, plaintiff attorney Michael Murphy said: “We’re very pleased with the court’s order and look forward to discovery proceeding in earnest.”
Tristram Coffin, the attorney for R.L. Vallee, said his clients were happy to comply.
“We have already produced hundreds of boxes of documents in hard copy and hundreds of thousands of emails, and the plaintiffs have yet to identify a single communication about price-fixing between any of the defendants or a single witness who can testify about that. So we will now give them some additional documents that will similarly not support their claims,” Coffin said in an email.
Coffin rejected the court’s suggestion that the timing of price decreases and increases during and after legislative hearings was suspicious.
“As for the issue about the timing of price changes, we dispute that claim as well and at the appropriate time will present our case that there was absolutely no collusion to fix prices in the Vermont market,” Coffin said.
The judge also rejected as premature the defendants’ request to have the plaintiffs produce the “expert analysis” they used to support their allegations of price-fixing.
“Expert analysis is critical in many lawsuits, but that does not mean parties automatically get to acquire pre-complaint expert opinions and analysis prior to the expert disclosure deadline,” Mello wrote.
The judge generally sided with the plaintiffs over allegations that their responses to questions from the defendants were too vague.
The judge, however, did chide the plaintiffs at one point to be more specific on some issues and not refer the defendants to a “wheelbarrow of documents.”