Bloomberg Reports FedEx Overcharging Clients

In shipping news of interest, Bloomberg today made the following report:

FedEx Corp. (FDX) has been “systematically overcharging” customers by billing businesses and government offices at higher residential rates, a company sales executive said in an internal e-mail unsealed in a lawsuit. “I have brought this to attention of many people over the past five or six years, including more than one managing director, and no action has been taken to address it,” Alan Elam wrote in an e-mail on Aug. 2, 2011. “My belief is that we are choosing not to fix this issue because it is worth so much money to FedEx,” Elam said in a separate e-mail that day. The e-mails were unsealed yesterday in a class-action, or group, lawsuit claiming FedEx Corp. and FedEx Corporate Services Inc. overcharged commercial and government customers as much as $3 each for millions of packages delivered. The plaintiffs, who claim violations of federal civil racketeering laws, seek three times the amount of the alleged overcharges in their lawsuit. “We allege that FedEx has and continues to engage in a pattern of intentionally charging its customers residential delivery fees for deliveries to obviously non-residential addresses such as courthouses, government offices and banks,” Steven J. Rosenwasser, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in an interview.

See the whole Bloomberg article here.