Meaning

noun a consortium of independent organizations formed to limit competition by controlling the production and distribution of a product or service

originIn the business sense, borrowed from German Kartell, first used by Eugen Richter in 1871 in the Reichstag. In the political sense, which was the vehicle for this metaphor, the English sense, like the German sense, was borrowed from French cartel in the sixteenth century, from Italian cartello, diminutive of carta (“card, page”), from Latin charta.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0