The story about alleged price-fixing by PVC pipe and conduit manufacturers continues to grow, with the latest angle being another proposed class-action lawsuit, this time filed by the Erie County Water Authority in Buffalo, N.Y.
Catherine Kavanaugh covered Tuesday’s news, but last week I took a turn, covering the disclosure by one of the publicly traded plaintiffs of a U.S. Department of Justice investigation.
There are lots of interesting angles to this story, but one that’s really unusual is the role played by ManBearChicken.
He — I assume ManBear is a man, but I don’t know his real name — is a financial investigator and short seller who writes a substack called ManBearChicken’s Coop. He established his reputation with his 2016 investigation of price-fixing in the poultry industry, which resulted in indictments and a $107 million fine for Pilgrim’s Pride.
In July, ManBear contacted me and shared a 27-page research report he’d just completed on the PVC pipe industry. He believed that price-fixing was happening in the sector, resulting in unsustainably high profits for the largest North American pipe and conduit extruders, including four publicly traded companies.
I’d never heard of ManBear, but a quick online search made it clear that he was a serious short seller, and his name came up frequently on message boards like SeekingAlpha and Reddit.
ManBear’s report, and Catherine’s story from September, gave fascinating details on the alleged role of a specialty industry newsletter that he thinks the pipe companies used to signal pricing moves. That company — the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS), whose PetroChem Wire publishes the PVC & Pipe Weekly report — is now one of the defendants in the price-fixing suits.
OPIS denies the allegations, as have some of the pipe companies that have commented to Plastics News.