UK supermarket sector set for competition probe

9 March 2006 – London (UK):  The UK’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT)  has  proposed referring the nation’s supermarket sector to the Competition Commission for investigation.
 
"There are features of the market which, when considered in the context of increased consolidation and the move by supermarkets into the convenience sector, could reasonably be suspected to distort competition and harm consumers," the OFT said. 
 
In response to the news, Tesco said in a statement that it was "confident that once the other observations in the OFT’s report are explored the regulators will find that they are misplaced".