They are particularly prone to the activities of cartels.Five directors of the companies had earlier pleaded guilty to, or been found guilty of, aiding and abetting contempt of court by their companies. Others found guilty of operating cartels included Tarmac, Redland and ARC, part of Hanson.Mr Justice Buckley, president of the Restrictive Practices Court in London, said the fines were significantly higher than the court had imposed in the past. The cartels had constituted serious anti-competitive activity by leading companies in the industry whose objective had been to distort the market and fix prices.He said: “Such behaviour is intolerable. TOM STEVENSON

Deputy City Editor
A fair trading court has imposed record fines totalling pounds 8.4m on some of Britain’s largest building companies for price-fixing and market-sharing agreements Hardest hit was RMC, which was fined pounds 3.85m.

The Japanese car plants have a high British component content.Car investments also includes expansion by overseas-owned companies already here, such as Ford’s decision to concentrate new investment in Jaguar in Britain rather than the alternative of the US.The DTI said the inflow had helped to modernise the industrial base, provide more jobs and output as well as new products and processes, fill gaps in local production and bring in technology and management expertise.The DTI said one in 100 UK firms were overseas-owned and were larger than average.. Sectors favoured by foreign investors include vehicles, chemicals, engineering, electronics, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.Studies have shown that in some industries, such as cars, the arrival of better management practices is an important benefit to the UK, because it provides a benchmark for domestic companies to improve their own methods.Japanese companies’ high standards help to raise the efficiency of UK component suppliers. More than half of the investments are expansions of existing plants.The UK received more than 40 per cent of Japanese and US investment in the EU. With the new Samsung plant in Wynyard, near Stockton-on-Tees, it will have attracted more than half of Korean investment.Siemens was won over to a UK site after a substantial effort co-ordinated by DTI officials specialising in winning international investment projects for the UK.The project team was led by the DTI’s Invest in Britain Bureau (IBB) and the Industrial Development Unit, which handles all the department’s large regional aid cases.The IBB and English Partnerships – a body set up to boost regeneration and inward investment – assisted Siemens in its final studies of site locations, local services and facilities.Foreign companies come to the UK for a variety of reasons, including relatively low labour costs, availability of skilled workers, government aid packages, freedom from government red tape – compared with some European competitors – and a preference in the case of the Japanese and the Americans for English as a working language.The Siemens plant is the biggest and certainly one of the most technically advanced of recent investment projects.

PETER RODGERS

Business Editor
Britain’s record in attracting overseas investment has been one of the government’s success stories – so much so that it has aroused concern and even anger on the continent.The UK has been attracting a third of all inward investment to the European union, and is the favourite location for Japanese, US and Korean companies.The Department of Trade and Industry says that in the last two years, there have been 865 inward investment projects linked to the creation of 188,000 new jobs. Now only one deep mine, Ellington, remains, operated by a workforce of a few hundred.The image of dirty overalls, smokestacks, pit-heaps and shipyard cranes has been replaced by one of diversity.Foreign investment has been an important part of the transformation, with more than 380 companies investing in the North-east and Cumbria.They have pumped more than pounds 4bn into their projects, creating more than 32,000 new jobs and safeguarding over 21,000 more.Although not the first Japanese firm to move into the region, Nissan led the dramatic change with its 1984 decision to set up its first UK car plant in Sunderland, where unemployment was high.. The region, once a cornerstone of the industrial revolution, has lost nearly all its heavy industry, which as recently as the mid-1970s employed a third of the working population.Besides the loss of tens of thousands of shipbuilding jobs, the region has watched the decimation of its coal industry, which in 1947 employed 148,000 men. It has not been easy in Wallsend since the closure of Swans – the place was killed off, but trade will surely start picking up again because it has been fairly flat for the last two years.”Winning the microchip factory is the latest phase in the transformation of the North-east of England, which in 15 years has seen its industrial identity totally changed.