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A group of minority shareholders in Pilgrim’s Pride are suing executives from both JBS and Pilgrim’s Pride over the acquisition of the Northern Irish poultry company Moy Park by JBS in 2017.
Pilgrim’s Pride is the US subsidiary of the Brazilian based JBS and court documents show that the minority shareholders allege that JBS needed to “raise cash quickly” and effectively pressurised Pilgrim’s Pride to buy Moy Park.
Allegations
“The company ultimately agreed to pay what was effectively the same price that parent demanded in its opening ask, even though that price was higher than what the company’s internal analyses supported and what strategic bidders were willing to pay,” court documents state.
According to the documents, the cash injection was needed to pay Brazilian government fines of $3.2bn after the owners of JBS, Joesley and Wesley Batista, testified that they had bribed a large number of senior politicians in Brazil.
No date is set for the trial but a judge in Delaware has ruled that the executives from JBS and Pilgrim’s Pride will face trial.
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