AU Optronics, Taiwan’s biggest flat panel maker by sales, faces the prospect of paying hundreds of millions in fines and seeing top executives jailed should it lose a US criminal trial into alleged price fixing that began this week.
The trial, which started on Monday in San Francisco, represents the last stage of a long-running antitrust investigation that has involved authorities from Europe, South Korea, Japan and the US.
Prosecutors allege that AU Optronics conspired with other flat panel makers to fix prices for its products between 2001 and 2006. According to documents filed when AU Optronics was first indicted in 2010, the US Department of Justice alleges the price fixing had hurt some of the biggest technology companies including Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Dell.