It would seem that the Cadbury Easter Bunny has been consorting with a cast of maniacal chocolate Ooompa Loompas!

Cadbury, Mars, Hershey and Nestlé have been served with a lawsuit alleging that they conspired to push up the prices of their chocolate bars over most of the last decade, drawing on claims that senior executives shared secret price information in brown envelopes and via distributors.

The suit, served in Hershey’s home state of Pennsylvania by a Minnesota grocery chain called Supervalu, adds to a mountain of litigation and regulatory scrutiny over alleged price-fixing.

Why this reminds me of Matt Damon in The Informant! Looks like Archers Daniel Midland aren’t the only ones out there price-fixing.

I must say I find this situation absolutely interesting. Here you have this greedy and filthy board of directors over at Cadbury totally thumbing their noses at shareholders so that they can continue to get their largesse.

A new lawsuit filed by a shareholder of chocolatier Cadbury stands as a poster-child example of challenges in corporate America. Cadbury, which is considering a takeover bid from Kraft Foods, may be turning its nose up at the $15.68 billion bid, the case alleges, because fat-cat board members at Cadbury are clinging to their cushy power positions and huge paychecks — despite what makes the most sense for the company’s shareholders.

Of course being taken over by another corporation is not always the best thing, but in this case it seems it would be for the shareholders, both big and small. What I’d be more concerned about is the effect this would have on employees of Cadbury which you don’t hear anything about in this article.

Looks like they’re backing out of agreements over there in the UK.

Cadbury’s had agreed a deal of RPI plus 0.5 per cent but with a minimum of 2 per cent for 2009. However, as RPI in February was 0 per cent the company is breaking the original agreement and instead imposing a deal of 0.5 per cent. This comes despite the 30 per cent leap in profits across the company this year.

According to Jennie Formby, Unite national officer for the food and retail sector, the company must honour its previous commitment to the workforce: “This broken promise on fair pay is simply not acceptable. Cadbury’s managers and shareholders are getting fat on the profits generated by this loyal workforce but while chocolate sales and Cadbury directors salaries’ appear to be recession proof, workers’ wages are melting away.