You could be disqualified as a company director or face criminal prosecution – and your firm could be slapped with fines running into the millions. That’s the strong message from the Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA), which has publicised a spate of anti-corruption cases involving construction companies over the past few months. The competition watchdog says it has five cartel investigations and two merger studies ongoing into construction firms, and only last week it announced that three directors at fit-out firms had been banned for colluding on prices.

It’s been a decade since the industry was hit by so many corruption cases at once – back then, 103 firms were fined a total £130m after a lengthy investigation into cover-pricing by the CMA’s predecessor, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT). The hope was that construction had smartened up its act – but could it be that memories have faded? Or have the years of austerity taken their toll on industry ethics, as firms struggle to survive? 

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