An industrial pigeon comes home to roost

A fat, waddling, and thoroughly unwelcome pigeon looks like it will come home to roost in Nottinghamshire's construction industry sometime over the next couple of weeks.
It glories in the name of cover-pricing.
This is the practice where construction firms are said to have deliberately bid too high for contracts to build schools, hospitals and council offices so that their rivals would get the job instead.
Now, if you speak to the firms themselves they will maintain there was nothing dodgy about this – they stayed in the good books of the public sector by being seen to bid for business, but avoided taking on work that chock-full, boom-time order books meant they hadn't got time to do.
So, fair enough then, eh?
Well, no. What's a little whiffy about arrangements like this is the fact that the construction firms never told the client that they had been chatting among themselves about the size of the bids they would submit.
The result? The risk that councils and health services looking at documents which appeared to contain the best value prices may instead have been examining artificially inflated figures agreed between supposedly competing bidders.
Worse still, it's claimed that in a small number of cases the construction firms agreed on who would bid what on condition that the winner would bung a few quid in the direction of the losers.
This is one of the reasons why what had allegedly been custom and practice among building firms across the East Midlands has become the subject of one of the biggest investigations ever carried out by the Office of Fair Trading.
Realising that it would be difficult to argue that this wasn't anti-competitive practice, some of the firms involved have co-operated with the OFT's investigators in return for leniency.
The result is that when the OFT announces the results of its investigation (possibly next week) some of the fines will be comparatively small.
But because the fines relate to how much money a company brings in annual turnover – which is tens or hundreds of millions in some cases - these fines could still be painful.
Tough, you may say. Bear this in mind, though: the OFT is likely to look at the last submitted accounts when it decides what the relevant turnover figure was.
This could mean that the fines some firms get are based on how well they were doing before recession knocked the stuffing out of the whole industry.
Indeed, it's been suggested to me that some of the firms involved are now doing so badly that a hefty fine could finish them off. We'll see.
As savage as the OFT's indictment is likely to be, it doesn't mean the construction industry simply decided to have a ball with taxpayers' money.
It may mean that the whole area of public sector building has suffered the same boom-time excesses that have surfaced in politics and sport.
Put crudely, amid a public sector building bonanza there was more than enough money to go around.
So it did.