What a deal, $12 million in land for only $250k, darn that invisible hand and its vigorish.
“It was valued at $4 million. Perdue bought it for $250,000. He sold it months - MONTHS - later for $12 MILLION”
Trump’s Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue used his office to benefit food industry giants. In return, companies sold Perdue valuable land.
Danny Brown, the former president of AGrowStar, confirmed negotiations began in late 2015. But Brown said ADM wanted $4 million for the plant — 16 times what Perdue’s company ultimately paid for it.
The timing of the sale just as Perdue was about to become the most powerful man in U.S. agriculture raises legal and ethics concerns, from the narrow question of whether the secretary followed federal financial disclosure requirements to whether the transaction could have been an attempt to influence an incoming government official, in violation of bribery statutes, ethics lawyers say.
“This stinks to high heaven,” said Julie O’Sullivan, a Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor. “It deserves a prosecutor’s attention,” she added. “Only a prosecutor with the powers of the grand jury can find out, in fact, whether there was a quid pro quo that existed at the time of the deal.”
[...]
The sale of Perdue’s company was also obscured by complex financial moves that appear to have evaded at least the spirit of an agreement Perdue made with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, according to Walter Shaub, who led the agency at the time.
“This may be a matter for the FBI to investigate, frankly,” he said.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
The company has a history of manipulating markets. In the late ’90s, three ADM executives were convicted in a global price-fixing scheme and sentenced to prison terms. ADM was fined $100 million — the largest antitrust fine in U.S. history at the time.
Perdue family.