Yes. it’s shenanigans. No, it’s not CCP. Not that they don’t get up to other shenanigans but not this one.
One of the ways that EVE stands apart from other games and makes it interesting, is that player shenanigans are allowed and even encouraged. Market manipulation, trade cartels and price fixing are part of the game.
ICY announcing their service, 2017:
Sample player reaction to the cartel, a year later:
CCP has employees that play the game, and some EVE players have gone on to become CCP employees. So yes, some of them are somewhat active in the game, but they’re supposed to keep their personal game efforts apart from their ‘official’ CCP game plan.
CCP does intervene in some markets at times, when things get significantly out of whack. Also, they confiscate RMT, botting, and exploiting accounts and this takes many resources out of the game which also affects markets. They have been said to feed some of those resources back into the game at times to even out imbalances.
Overall though, EVE markets are big enough and active enough with enough players that CCP both doesn’t need to and probably couldn’t really manipulate them effectively, on a long-term basis.