Triumph agrees to $4.1M, Agri Stats to reform in pork lawsuit

A group of plaintiffs in a multidistrict pork-price fixing lawsuit are seeking preliminary approval for their settlements with the final two defendants in the case, Triumph Foods and Agri Stats, Inc. The Triumph settlement would provide the Consumer Indirect Purchaser Plaintiff Class $4.1 million in monetary relief, while the Agri Stats settlement calls for “unprecedented conduct relief.”

Co-lead counsel for the Consumer IPPs believe the Agri Stats negotiation will have pro-consumer benefits in the pork market should the firm choose to re-start selling pork reports. The conduct reform includes the permanent cessation of the sales reports.

“With these last two settlements, this brings recovery to the Consumer IPP Class to $212,065,000 – a substantial amount of recovery by any measure,” stated the attorneys. “In addition, the conduct reform agreed to by Agri Stats substantially changes the scope of information sharing that would be permitted in the industry. Should Agri Stats resume its pork reports, Agri Stats has agreed to substantially reshape their form, including removing participant lists, stopping the sales reports altogether, aggregating critical plant-level fields and removing suspect fields altogether. Thus, the settlement puts a permanent end to the reports that this court concluded were ‘the most suspicious’ of Agri Stats’s products.”