According to them, there was room to consider additional relevant criteria, when different defendants raised different criteria, including - the damage caused or expected to be caused to the public, the methodology of coordination, the intensity of coordination, the multiplicity of coordination, the number of wins due to coordination, the number of arrangements, the impact on future competition in the market, the depth of involvement and the multiplicity of involvement, as well as additional parameters such as the status of the person involved in the industry, the period of time the offense was committed, personal circumstances, and more.
- Some of the defendants also claimed that at the stage of focusing on enforcement, the ranking method gave the lowest weight to the restrictive arrangement offense, and then to the fraudulent offense, and the highest weight to the money laundering offense, due to the internal weighting of the number of offenses of any kind committed by each defendant and not in relation to the total number of offenses. They also argued that due to the weighting method chosen, excessive weight was given to the fraudulent offense, which was taken into account both in terms of the number of offenses, the accompanying money laundering offense, and the amount received fraudulently, and that there was room to determine an index based solely on the restrictive arrangement offenses and the amount of income. It was also argued that in other cases in which sums of similar amounts were discussed, the defendants were not charged with money laundering at all.
In this context, they added that giving the same weight to each of the types of offenses in the framework of determining the offense score creates a distortion and does not actually indicate the severity of the offense. Thus, for example, the existence of a fraudulent offense alongside the offense of a restrictive arrangement does not indicate the severity of the restrictive arrangement, and hence there was no room to give equal weight to the offense of fraud and the offense of the restrictive arrangement in determining the criminal score. In addition, the offense of fraud adds severity only to the defendant who approached the tender according to the coordination, while the actions of those who did not approach the tender within the framework of the coordination are equally serious. Attribution of severity according to the extent of the fraud also distorts the criminal score because weight is given to the total income as a result of the offense, even though in the case of restrictive arrangement offenses, the damage is calculated according to the difference between the adjusted price and the market price. Also due to the similarity in the factual basis of all the offenses attributed, a scoring scheme based on all the offenses creates excessive weight for offenses of fraud and money laundering. They also argued that it would have been appropriate to examine the dominance of the involvement in each center separately, and not in the indictment as a whole.