Chiquita settles shareholder suits

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Business Courier of Cincinnati

Thursday, January 7, 2010, 10:52am EST
Chiquita settles shareholder suits

Chiquita Brands International Inc. has reached a settlement with shareholders who sued the company following its 2007 guilty plea to charges that it financed terrorist organizations in Colombia. Notice of the settlement was filed in U.S. District Court in South Florida Wednesday.

Chiquita revealed in an SEC filing in October that it had reached an “agreement in principal” to settle four shareholder lawsuits filed in 2007. Those lawsuits alleged Chiquita officers breached their fiduciary duties to shareholders and wasted company resources by getting entangled in the Colombian payments.

The proposed settlement calls for “the adoption of certain governance and compliance changes by the company, as well as payment of attorneys’ fees to plaintiffs’ counsel in an amount that it is not material,” Chiquita said in its third quarter report to shareholders. Chiquita spokesman Ed Loyd declined to elaborate on the terms of the settlement, which he described as “favorable” to the company. He stressed that the deal requires court approval to be final.

The shareholder settlements do not impact several other lawsuits filed by Colombian citizens whose family members were killed by the paramilitary groups Chiquita admitted paying over a 15-year period. Plaintiff attorney Terry Collingsworth has estimated those cases could cost Chiquita more than $1 billion, but the company says the suits are without merit and that dozens of similar suits have been brought against other U.S. corporations but none have resulted in a judgment in favor of plaintiffs.

Read more: http://cincinnati.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/stories/2010/01/04/daily47.html

[HopeHoops]

1. This whole story is just bananas.

:hide:

[SharonAnn]

2. Chiquita is an evil company. They believe in totalitarian control and slave labor.

[Judi Lynn]

3. The Impunity of Chiquita Brands International: Friends in High Places

The Impunity of Chiquita Brands International: Friends in High Places
Written by CCAJAR
Thursday, 30 October 2008

After the factual proffer was filed in the case against Chiquita Brands International before the US District Court of the District of Columbia on March 14, 2007, in which it was verified Chiquita Brands International, through its subsidiary in Colombia, Banadex S.A., made monthly payments for over six years to the paramilitary structures in the regions of Urabá and Santa Marta, <1> the president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, declared before the mass media that he did not foresee any inconvenience for the Colombian justice system to request the extradition of this company’s board of directors. “Extraditions should be from here to there and from there to here <...> The decision is in the hands of the Attorney General’s Office," the president asserted at the time. <2> Nonetheless, since then, the president of Colombia has not mentioned the case again and much less the eventual extradition of the board of directors for their responsibility in the systematic commission of crimes against humanity and grave human rights violations by paramilitary organizations in these two regions, including forced displacement, homicide, torture, and forced disappearance, among other crimes. <3> This alliance between Chiquita Brands and the paramilitary structures came about during the growth and extension of the private security cooperatives Convivir, among them the Convivir Papagayo, sponsored by then governor of the department of Antioquia Álvaro Uribe Vélez, <4> through which the Chiquita payments were transferred to these paramilitary structures. <5> This same factual proffer, and later the government sentencing memorandum, established that these structures operated in alliance or through these private security cooperatives, <6> a situation that hade been widely denounced previously by human rights organizations.

The chain of impunity also involves the until recently director of the District Attorney’s Office of Medellín, Guillermo León Valencia Cossio, brother of the present minister of Interior and Justice, Fabio Valencia Cossio, <7> who is presently detained due to his alleged ties with the “demobilized” Daniel Rendón Herrera, aka Don Mario, older brother mayor of the former paramilitary boss Freddy Rendón Herrera, aka El Alemán. <8> It should be stressed that the criminal organization of aka Don Mario allegedly continues to use the weapons <9> that entered into Colombia on November 5, 2001, in the port of Zungo, specifically on the docks of Banadex S.A. <10> As if this were little, the prosecutor handling the case against Chiquita Brands, Alicia Domínguez Hoyos, reported she was pressured by Guillermo León Valencia Cossio, after she refused to allow Liceth Mira Álvarez Anaya -former prosecutor in Urabá and alleged ally of Valencia Cossio- to assume the defense of the former board members of the Convivir Papagayo. <11>

In the United States, Chiquita Brands has enjoyed the same fruits of impunity, given that its senior officials and executives move within the most powerful political sectors of the country, as is the case of Roderick M. Hills, one of the board members most responsible for financing the paramilitary structure in Colombia. As a Chiquita Brands board member and the president of the Audit Committee from March 19, 2002, <12> until June, 2007, <13> was intimately aware of these payments to the paramilitary structure. <14> Before joining Chiquita Brands, he was also legal counsel to then President Ford in 1975, and president of the board of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1975 to 1977, <15> which is the institution in charge of overseeing the New York stock exchange. While Roderick M. Hills led the defense of Chiquita Brands, his son-in-law, Steve Bunell, was appointed senior prosecutor of the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington D.C., which conducted the preliminary investigation against Chiquita Brands. Bunell recused himself from the case only after this evident conflict of interest was widely reported in the US mass media. <16> However, in addition to the support provided by Bunell during the federal investigation, Hills also held a series of meetings with different senior government officials from the Department of Justice in order to hinder the investigation, including a meeting with the then assistant attorney general of the Department of Justice and now secretary of homeland security, Michael M. Chertoff. <17>

On September 17, 2007, Chiquita Brands International pled guilty to the felony of “Engaging in Transactions with a specially-designated Global Terrorist” before the US District Court for the District of Columbia and was sentenced to paying 25 million dollars to the US Department of Justice. <18> In exchange for accepting this responsibility, the Court decided not to prosecute criminal charges or to identify the individual responsibilities of the implicated directors, which also opened the door to move forward the criminal cases in Colombia as well as the eventual extradition of the responsible parties. Throughout this period of time, the defense of Chiquita Brands had the assistance of Eric H. Holder Jr., former deputy attorney general of the US Department of Justice during the Clinton administration and now advisor for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, Barack H. Obama. <19>

More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1550/61/