US: Heir location services provider pleaded guilty to price fixing

Kemp & Associates, a Salt Lake City-based heir location services provider, and its co-owner, Daniel J. Mannix, pleaded guilty to allocating customers with another heir location services firm, the Department of Justice announced today.

Kemp & Associates and Mannix pleaded guilty to a one-count felony indictment filed on Aug. 17, 2016 in the US District Court in Salt Lake City.  The indictment charged Kemp & Associates and Mannix with conspiring with a competitor to suppress and eliminate competition by agreeing to allocate customers of heir location services sold in the United States between 1999 and 2014.  With today’s pleas, three executives and two companies have entered guilty pleas as a result of the federal antitrust investigation into customer allocation, price fixing, bid rigging, and other anticompetitive conduct in the heir location services industry.

“For over a decade, the defendants conspired to enrich themselves and to deprive heirs pursuing their rightful inheritances of the benefits of competition,” said Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division.  “Allocation schemes distort markets and cheat customers.  The Division will not waver in its commitment to protect consumers in all markets from schemes long-condemned as per se illegal.”