Inos said Rabby Syed, Jose Kiyoshi and Felipe Atalig, who were represented by attorney Ramon Quichocho, can amend within 20 days their allegation that Mobil and Shell engaged in price fixing.
Inos dismissed the remaining complaints as “futile”: that Mobil and Shell engaged in false advertisement, in unfair or deceptive business practices, and in fraud.
“Even if [the] plaintiffs had sufficiently alleged a price fixing agreement between Mobil and Shell, they have not provided a factual basis to support the second element of their…claim,” Inos said.
The plaintiffs, he added, “have not alleged a factual basis to support their allegations that the gasoline prices Mobil and Shell charged consumers bore no reasonable relationship to the cost of bringing gasoline to…the CNMI….”
In fact, Inos said, “there are no well-pleaded factual allegations in the complaint purporting to show the costs associated with selling regular, unleaded gasoline in the CNMI at all.”
“Without some understanding of these costs, [the] plaintiffs’ conclusory allegation that there is no reasonable relationship between the costs and the prices rings hollow,” Inos said.
According to the judge, the plaintiffs’ causes of action in counts II and III “fail as a matter of law…because gasoline is pumped in a continuous stream, which almost always requires the final price to be rounded to a whole cent, and Mobil and Shell follow CNMI’s rules and regulations for rounding their prices.”
Inos said the plaintiffs have not sufficiently alleged the elements in fraud, since they have not alleged an actionable misrepresentation, and have not sufficiently alleged the element of justifiable reliance.
Inos also noted that the plaintiffs’ claims are limited by statutes of limitations.
