According to the Bundeskartellamt, Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, the group was uniformly calculating scrap and alloy surcharges and had agreed to pass on the surcharges to customers on a one-to-one basis. The group also was sharing information on order books, customer inventories, capacities, mill outages and planned base price increases, the Bundeskartellamt said.

"For years, the companies have coordinated on important price components for the sale of special steel. By coordinating the calculation and implementation of uniform scrap and alloy surcharges across the sector and extensively exchanging competitively sensitive information, they have significantly restricted price competition between each other," Andreas Mundt, president of the Bundeskartellamt, said in a statement.

You can read the full announcement from the Bundeskartellamt here.