The work examines the criminal liability of bid-rigging agreements under the special provisions of German, French, and Italian law, and evaluates relevant initiatives at the EU level. The impetus for this presentation was the German tendencies of legislators and literature to include the organizer of a tender in the criminal liability under Section 298 of the German Penal Code. The focus of the German law section is on analyzing the characteristic of "illegal agreement" with an implicit reference to Section 1 of the German Competition Act. The author exemplarily investigates horizontal agreements such as protection offers, standstill agreements, bidding consortia, market information systems, and vertical agreements between suppliers and the organizing side regarding their criminal liability. In a parallel approach, he presents foreign laws and European initiatives from the Commission's Green Paper and the Corpus.