Report Reveals Why Lawyers OK'd Chiquita Payments to Colombian Terrorists

[struggle4progress]

April 27, 2009 8:39 PM
Report Reveals Why Lawyers OK'd Chiquita Payments to Colombian Terrorists
Posted by Brian Baxter

A new 269-page report by an independent special litigation committee reveals why Chiquita Brands International paid extortions to Colombian terrorists for 15 years, reports the Cincinnati Business Courier ...

Chiquita subsequently paid $25 million to settle a Justice Department investigation into the payments, making the company the first in the U.S. to be convicted of financial dealings with designated terrorist organizations.

Former Covington & Burling partner and current U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr., was tapped by Chiquita to handle the Justice Department inquiry. The ensuing legal proceedings raised questions about the legal advice Chiquita had received about the payments from its outside counsel at Kirkland & Ellis and touched off a turf war between Main Justice's criminal division and the U.S. attorney's office for the District of Columbia over how the investigation should proceed ...

According to the Courier, a special litigation committee report was filed along with a motion to dismiss the shareholder litigation, a fairly common occurrence. The massive report delves into how the $10,000 payments that Chiquita doled out in the eighties soon multiplied into multimillion dollar payments to right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerrillas a little more than a decade later ...

http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2009/04/chiquita-lawyers-payments-colombian-terrorists.html

[Bacchus39]

1. the second paragraph, which you omitted, states the "why"

"Cincinnati-based Chiquita, one of the world's top banana producers, admitted in March 2007 that it had paid millions to several Colombian terrorist groups in order to protect its workers and business interests in the South American country."

and extortion by paras and rebels is a common practice.