Manish Kumar

Kumar is chief of the San Francisco office of the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust division. The office maintains a civil and criminal antitrust practice, which includes international price-fixing investigations, civil antitrust investigations, and domestic bid-rigging and procurement fraud investigations.

In December 2019, Kumar won a price-fixing conviction in a major criminal antitrust case involving the former CEO of Bumble Bee Foods LLC. A federal jury in San Francisco agreed that Christopher Lischewski conspired to fix prices of canned tuna sold in the United States. U.S. v. Lischewski, 18-CR0203 (N.D. Cal., filed May 16, 2018).

The trial appeared to turn in part on testimony by the head of Bumble Bee rival Chicken of the Sea International. Kumar elicited a witness-stand admission that the two had an "understanding" not to employ "aggressive promotion" tactics to discount their brands.

Last week, Lischewski was sentenced to 40 months in jail and ordered to pay a $100,000 criminal fine.

"Even though their scheme only stole a few cents at a time, those numbers added up and they added up fast," Kumar told jurors, according to published reports.

Last week, Lischewski was sentenced to 40 months in jail and ordered to pay a $100,000 criminal fine.

"We are your friendly local antitrust agency just up the road," Kumar said with a smile at a Stanford University workshop in February on venture capital and antitrust. "If anyone should find themselves in the middle of a price-fixing conspiracy, we have a generous self-reporting program."

Kumar, who was born in Brazil to Indian parents and immigrated to the U.S. at age four, studied political science and economics at Stanford and went to law school at the University of Minnesota.

He clerked for a federal judge in Nevada, joined a U.S. Department of Justice honors program in 2009 and asked for assignment to the San Francisco antitrust division. Prior to becoming chief, Kumar served as an assistant chief for two years and completed a detail as a special assistant U.S. attorney in the district.

"I have long been interested in antitrust because of my economics background and my interest in the way U.S. markets operate," he said. "They are a huge source of opportunity and prosperity for all sorts of people who come to the U.S. Antitrust enforcement protects the free operation of the market."

Kumar oversees an office of 25 lawyers and about the same number of staff. He said he has a number of civil and criminal investigations currently pending, though he declined to identify them. "This is a high-achieving office because we have such excellent people," he said.

At the Stanford conference, Kumar credited antitrust enforcement in the 1998 case against Microsoft Corp. for aiding innovation by disruptive startups.

"I know minds may differ on this, but I happen to believe that the government's successful case against Microsoft somewhat ironically may well have paved the way and made room for some of the market-leading platforms that were the subject of our conversations today," he said.

-- John Roemer