CARTELS: End of the Match Game

Ivar Kreuger, ill-famed Swedish match king, shot himself in a Paris apartment 14 years ago, but the evil that he did lived after him.* Not until this week were the effects of his slick cartel-making wiped out in the U.S. The end came in a consent decree in the Government antitrust suit against Kreuger’s old Swedish Match Co. and six companies dominated by secretive U.S. Match King William Armstrong Fairburn. A Federal court in Manhattan ordered a stop to such cartel practices as: ¶ Dividing the world into noncompetitive markets. ¶ Restricting production. ¶ Fixing prices on matches, match machinery and match chemicals. ¶ Suppressing the manufacture of new “everlasting” or re-ignitable matches. The U.S. defendants, headed by big Diamond Match, were told (and agreed) to divest themselves of each other’s stock, get rid of interlocking directorates.

* The final cleanup of his financial mess last year showed that he had swindled the public of $560,000,000 (TIME, Nov. 5, 1945).