It is the most weird thing ever. Theoretically this can not ever happen it is a breach of consensus. I've seen some people are suggesting it to have something with 51% attack, false!
An attacker with 100% hashpower can't enforce any consensus rule change including and most importantly block reward or to be more specific inflation policy. So what the heck?
I can imagine just one disappointing scenario: There are very few full nodes and the attacker has taken control of some while block explorers are using spv clients that have trust in compromised nodes. I'm still banging my head over and over to find other explanation.
This is what I thought when I saw it.
I'm not as familiar with ETC but can you choose your fee? It has happened with BTC in the past where someone put the amount they wanted to transfer in the fee and the amount they wanted as the fee in the transfer portion of the transaction resulting in an enormous miner fee on the block that included the transaction. Does ETC work this way? Maybe someone is dumping coins to miners on purpose?
I do not think how much a sender puts in for the fee is related to how much is sent to the pools.
They divide it up between the miners on their pool in the end.