The Unfair Trade practices include cases of hoarding, destruction of or refusal to sell, goods or services. Clause (5) says that a practice will be unfair if it permits the hoarding or destruction of goods, or refusal to sell the goods or to provide any services if such conduct is intended to raise or has the effect of raising the cost of those or other similar goods or services.
Loss or damage: It is not necessary for restraining an unfair trade practices that the complainant should have suffered some loss, damage or prejudice. Such consequences can be compensated in addition to the cease and desist order.
1>Hoarding:
Hoarding is a moral term meaning taking more than one's fair share of goods. Hoarding of goods with an intention to raise cost is considered as unfair trade practice as the consumer has to pay extra to buy the goods or services. Hoarding was a prevalent practice where traders and middlemen used to hoard essential goods and wait for their prices to peak. Once that is done they used to make huge profits by selling it at high prices. As soon as the traders get a heads up that the production of a particular good has been short they used to hoard it. Recently when there was a shortage of Sugar and Onion production a lot of traders hoarded the goods and made things worse for the common man by further increasing the prices.
Other examples of Hoarding are seen in speculative buying of property and goods. This tends to drive up the price of property and goods costing the public more money for the basic necessities of life and lowering slightly the quality of their lives by denying them the satisfaction of finding affordable deals they can buy.
Hoarding is also prevalent in the IT industry, for e.g. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) created the Internet domain name system. So domain names were once freely available to buy on the internet from domain name