Bad Optics

Adam Smith writes:-

The Wealth Of Nations, Book IV Chapter VIII, v. ii, p. 660, para. 49.

…AND THE DISTORTION OF TRADE

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices…. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary.

Mitie had their head office raided by the CMA this month for apparent breaches in competition laws. Mitie and PAE have a joint venture with a company called Landmarc.

Both companies are in a framework agreement with MoD. The purposes of these framework agreements is that the MoD can send companies within the framework tenders and assume all will submit enders to win. That does not appear to be the case with Mitie hence the raid on their offices to study senior management emails.

From experience in the industry this is a first and the accusation was met by implausable deniability from Mite. I also know from experience is senior managers emailling each other never assume that their correspondace will be scutinised by an outside authoring.

As in all these cases a good place to start is "who benefits"? It is rarely the customer.