Monsanto fined $1.5m for bribery

[Pert_UK]

"The US agrochemical giant Monsanto has agreed to pay a $1.5m (£799,000) fine for bribing an Indonesian official.

Monsanto admitted one of its employees paid the senior official two years ago in a bid to avoid environmental impact studies being conducted on its cotton.

In addition to the penalty, Monsanto also agreed to three years' close monitoring of its business practices by the American authorities...

Monsanto also has admitted to paying bribes to a number of other high-ranking officials between 1997 and 2002. "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4153635.stm

All our stuff is completely safe but we'd really rather you relied on our word for it and didn't check it for yourself. Any negative effects will be purely coincidental.....Here's some cash for your troubles.....

Ethical business practice in action.......

[KlatooBNikto]

1. Wasn't Don Rumsfeld a Director of Monsanto at one time?

[LiberalVoice]

3. I really hope so. n/t

[Robert Oak]

8. Seale, orchestrated FDA approval of aspartame

plus involved in acquisition of Seale by Monsanto.

Monsanto has to be the poster child for evil multinational corporation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumsfeld

Europeans are of course ahead, aspartame isn't allowed in some European countries because it is linked with all sorts of health problems.

[KlatooBNikto]

10. I think you mean G.D. Searle.Rumsfeld became the Chairman of

G.D. Searle after he pulled a few shenanigans to get Nutrasweet approved over the objections of FDA staff.When things got hot, he unloaded G.D.Searle to Monsanto when he was also a Director of Monsanto,thus double dealing himself.In the process he became a multimillionaire, a story that keeps repeating itself like clockwork throughout the Bush administration.


Free enterprise and risk taking are for ordinary people like us. A sure bet and a sweethear deal are for the favored few like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.I guess that's the way the world works.

[punpirate]

2. The truly hilarious line in this...

... "Monsanto also agreed to three years' close monitoring of its business practices by the American authorities...."

That would be the Bushies, would it not? :eyes:

[NYC]

4. That was the sentence that stood out

for me, too.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

5. I'm glad they got caught, but that slap on the hand is not enough.

They are on my top ten list of vile companies. Leaving the 'American authorities' to watch them is just lip service. It equates to letting them continue on with their genetically engineered takeover of the worlds agriculture.

[Quakerfriend]

7. Yes, so true

As R.Nader once said, "We are allowing multinational corp.'s to co-op our flora and fauna."

When Berkley fired the prof. who published re: contamination of native Mexican corn by GE varieties (in NATURE) that made me furious!

I heard that it was because of Monsanto $$ at Berkley!!

[unblock]

6. judge, here's $10,000 to forget about all these bribery lies!

[Robert Oak]

9. lawsuits

What's so disturbing on "tort reform" is multinationals are notorious
for factoring in lawsuits and large awards and doing something
anyway because the profits always exceed any damages awarded by the courts...

Instead of caps, we should be "upping" the damages to take all of the profits absolute,
and put them into some sort of "money for the citizens of the world"
account.

A case in point is the dot con era. The fines levied on Citigroup
and the like from the NY attorney general didn't add up to a hill
of beans in comparison to the ill gotten gains from those
"special offers" of pre-ipo stock to CEO's..not even 0.0001% of the total take.

Same with this. 1.5M dollars probably is about 2% of their bribe
fund...doesn't hurt Monsanto at all.

[jayfish]

11. Why Is It OK For The Government Too...

break the backs of normal citizens through the use of draconian fines and punishments but these fuckers get off, basically, scott-free? This company should be preparing to liquidate its assets to pay its' retribution. It's getting tiresome.

Jay

[htuttle]

13. Because we have a government by, for and of the corporations

People who believe otherwise are not only naive -- they haven't been paying attention.

[goodhue]

12. kick

This should be a big story.

Has Gonzalez been questioned about corporate scandals whatsoever?
Was he not a partner in Texas law firm that worked for Enron?

[NickB79]

14. The potential of genetic engineering will never be realized with Monsanto

As long as Monsanto is leading the way for developing new crops, we will never see the true potential that next-generation GM crops could provide. Such a wonderous technology, squandered by a corporation as greedy as Monsanto.

[Redstone]

15. The only group of people mor evil than Monsanto,

anywhere on the face of the planet, is the B*ush administration.

And if anyone has any question about Bush being beholden to Monsanto, just look up his speech at the Coast Guard Academy graduation in 2004.

I remember being dumfounded that he was using the occasion to toll the African countries that they need to get with the program and start using genetically-engineered crop seeds...made by guess who?

I called it "The Monsanto Speech."

Has there ever been another time when a president has given a speech solely for the benefit of one company? I can't think of one. If anyone else can, let me know.

Redstone