The Office of Fair Trading is seeking a meeting with the British Association of Pharmaceutical Wholesalers to discuss its members' role in resale price maintenance. Pharmaceutical wholesalers recently resigned from the Proprietary Articles Trade Association because of "unreasonable demands" from the OFT for sales data that the wholesalers were not in a position to provide without expensive rewriting of computer software and use of management time (PJ, September 11, p373).
The OFT claimed in a press release on October 19 that it was sensitive to the need to minimise the burden of collecting data for the RPM court case, which is due to start on October 2, 2000. The OFT wants to find out about the differences between margins earned by wholesalers on price maintained products and comparable health and beauty products and the differences in discounts obtained by wholesalers from manufacturers and given by wholesalers to retailers.