A group of plaintiffs in a multidistrict pork-price fixing lawsuit has received final approval for their $48 million settlement reached with Tyson Foods. The court also approved reimbursement of $22,051.20 in litigation expenses, awarded attorneys' fees of $15,983,482.93 (one-third of the net settlement) and granted $2,500 service awards to each of the 11 named class representatives, all to be paid from the settlement fund. The Commercial and Institutional Indirect Purchaser Plaintiffs’ agreement with Tyson in In re Pork was approved by U.S. District Judge John Tunheim.
"This is the sixth settlement the CIIPPs have negotiated in the pork litigation. In combination with the CIIPPs’ earlier settlements with defendants JBS, Smithfield, Seaboard, Hormel and Clemens, this settlement would bring the total monetary relief to more than $114 million," noted co-lead counsel for the Commercial IIPPs.
The In re Pork lawsuits, which started back in 2018, claim that Tyson, Clemens Food Group, Hormel Foods, Seaboard Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS USA and Triumph Foods “entered into a conspiracy from at least 2009 to the present to fix, raise, maintain and stabilize the price of pork.” The plaintiffs contend that the processors participated in a price-fixing scheme by “systematically controlling their output” with benchmarking information received from Agri Stats.
Three groups of plaintiffs are involved in the lawsuit: Direct Purchase Plaintiffs, Commercial IIPPs (businesses and institutions that indirectly purchased pork products) and Consumer IPPs (individual consumers who purchased pork products indirectly from the defendants).
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