Union Pacific Files Motion to Dismiss Oxbow’s Meritless Lawsuit
On August 15, 2011, Union Pacific filed a motion with the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia asking the court to dismiss Oxbow’s meritless antitrust lawsuit.
Union Pacific is confident that it will demonstrate to the court that:
- Union Pacific has not violated the antitrust laws.
- Union Pacific has not conspired with any other railroad to fix prices or reduce competition for rail transportation of any customer or commodity, including Oxbow and its shipments.
- Union Pacific has not engaged in monopolistic behavior that has caused damage to Oxbow.
Following are some of the key points that serve as the basis for Union Pacific’s motion to dismiss.
- Oxbow’s litany of disconnected complaints about Union Pacific’s rates and services does not constitute an antitrust claim.
- Oxbow’s complaint is a hodgepodge of unrelated and often contradictory claims.
- The complaint on its face is deficient under the law and should be thrown out by the court at this stage because Oxbow’s string of allegations are largely incoherent and don’t come close to providing the factual allegations necessary to state an antitrust claim.
- Oxbow makes conclusory allegations with no factual particulars to support its allegations.
- Oxbow’s complaint fails to recognize that its Colorado mine is served only by Union Pacific which acquired rights to serve that mine when Union Pacific acquired Southern Pacific in a 1996 transaction approved by the Surface Transportation Board (STB). Southern Pacific was the only railroad serving Oxbow’s Colorado mine before that proceeding. The STB rejected requests in the Southern Pacific merger proceeding to allow a second railroad to use Union Pacific tracks to serve the Colorado mines that only Southern Pacific served. Union Pacific’s continuation of and improvement in service to Colorado mines does not constitute a violation of the antitrust laws.
- Oxbow failed to acknowledge that the STB conducted annual oversight proceedings in the Union Pacific/Southern Pacific merger case from 1996 through 2001 and found that Union Pacific invested heavily in the infrastructure necessary to haul Colorado coal, as it indicated it would.
- Oxbow’s lawsuit does not describe a single communication of any kind between BNSF and Union Pacific regarding Oxbow’s alleged conspiracy theory.
- Oxbow ignored publicly available facts showing that Union Pacific and BNSF have separate and different fuel surcharges for coal, which are also different from the particular fuel surcharge that Oxbow claims arose from a price-fixing conspiracy.
- Oxbow claims that Union Pacific and BNSF stopped competing for each other’s customers, yet Oxbow’s complaint acknowledges that the two railroads continued to bid for the same customers and that the railroads won customers away from each other.
- Oxbow’s allegations of anticompetitive conduct are actually examples of business conduct that is consistent with Union Pacific independently pursuing its own business interests, not the product of any antitrust conspiracy or effort to monopolize the western coal market as Oxbow seems to define it.