Turkey fined five supermarket chains ₺2.67bn for using suppliers as a price-fixing hub

Turkey opened an investigation into how the chains selling packaged food and cleaning products — and the producers and wholesalers supplying them — had set prices during the coronavirus pandemic. On 28 October 2021 the Competition Board (Rekabet Kurulu) closed it with decision 21-53/747-360, finding that BİM Birleşik Mağazalar, CarrefourSA, Migros Ticaret, Savola Gıda, ŞOK Marketler and Yeni Mağazacılık (A101) had infringed Article 4 of Law No. 4054 and must pay administrative fines. Other undertakings in the file were cleared for want of evidence of an infringement.

The reasoned decision, published in January 2022, set out how the coordination worked. Rival chains arranged prices and the timing of price transitions directly, or indirectly through suppliers they all bought from. They exchanged competitively sensitive information: future prices, price-change dates, seasonal activities and campaigns. When one chain cut prices, or had not yet raised them while the market moved up, the others intervened through the supplier so that the shelf price was pushed up against consumers' interest.

Discipline was kept commercially. Where a supplier did not deliver the intervention, retailers cut return invoices to it — a punishment the Board read as continuous monitoring of compliance with the arrangement. It characterised the whole pattern as a cartel with hub-and-spoke (topla-dağıt) features aimed at fixing retail sale prices. Savola Gıda, a supplier, was found to have mediated the coordination of shelf prices and price transitions between the retailers and to have passed on their future prices and dates, making it responsible alongside them and to the same degree.

The fines came to ₺2.67bn: BİM ₺958.1M, Yeni Mağazacılık (A101) ₺646.6M, Migros ₺517.7M, Şok ₺384.4M, CarrefourSA ₺142.5M, and Savola Gıda ₺22.2M plus ₺11.1M for fixing retailers' resale prices — among the highest ever imposed under Turkish competition law. Dissenting members argued that no direct communication between rivals had been proved and that the conduct should have been treated as resale price maintenance or information exchange rather than a hub-and-spoke cartel.

₺2.67bn of administrative fines on 28 October 2021: BİM ₺958.1M, A101 ₺646.6M, Migros ₺517.7M, Şok ₺384.4M, CarrefourSA ₺142.5M, Savola Gıda ₺33.3M.

Category teams used the suppliers they all bought from as a shared message bus for future prices, price-change dates and campaign calendars.

When a rival discounted, or lagged a market-wide increase, the others had that shelf price corrected through the supplier.

Compliance was policed with commercial pressure: suppliers that would not intervene were hit with return invoices, which the Board read as monitoring of the arrangement.

The hub was treated as a participant rather than a conduit — Savola Gıda was fined alongside the retailers and held equally responsible.

Pandemic food inflation put shelf prices under public and political scrutiny, so conduct that had been routine became the subject of a formal investigation.

A shared supplier is not a neutral channel. Future prices and shelf-price dates passed through one become the spokes of a cartel — and the supplier in the middle is fined with the retailers.

Migros announced it would sue to annul the decision and BİM followed a day later, calling the penalty unjust and objecting that markets were being cast as the cause of the cost of living; appeals lay with the Ankara administrative courts. The scrutiny did not end there. On 18 March 2025 the Board opened two fresh investigations into the same five chains, one also covering Nilky İçecek ve Gıda, a second into dairy suppliers Güney Süt and Ak Gıda, alleging BİM and Şok exchanged competitively sensitive information through Güney Süt. Opening an investigation is not a finding of infringement.