Seven leading manufacturing companies – including the likes of Siemens, Hitachi and Toshiba – were on Wednesday found to have rigged the international market for power transformers and fined a total of €67.6m ($99.7m) by Europe’s top competition watchdog.

The European Commission said that, for a four-year period, Japanese and European producers of power transformers operating a “market sharing” agreement, under which the Japanese companies agreed not to sell in Europe and the European firms agreed to stay out of the market in Japan.