‘GROWS’ ON U.S.
New gov’t farm cash to dubious foreign firm
More than $200,000 meant for struggling American farmers was given this year by the Trump administration to a grain supplier owned by a Japanese corporation with a history of corruption — the second foreign-controlled company to be showered with such bailout cash, federal records show.
Columbia Grain International, an Oregon-based subsidiary of Japanese trading powerhouse Marubeni, was awarded two taxpayer-funded bailout contracts in February from the Agriculture Department for green and yellow split peas with a combined worth of $203,000, according to previously undisclosed purchase reports seen by the Daily News.
The bailouts were issued despite Marubeni having been prosecuted by the Justice Department for criminal violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that resulted in the corporation having to pay more than $140 million in fines, according to court papers.
The Columbia Grain payouts came from the $1.2 billion bailout program President Trump rolled out last year to help U.S. farmers struggling to sell their products because of his tariff-heavy trade war with China and other countries.
JBS USA, a Colorado-based subsidiary of Brazil’s JBS SA, the largest meat-packer in the world, has received at least $62 million in bailout cash from the same pot of federal money, as first reported by the Daily News last month.
The JBS payouts stoked outrage among congressional Democrats and industry watchdogs, who questioned how subsidizing a massive foreign-owned corporation would help farmers in the American heartland. Dems were also incensed that the administration handed out millions to JBS despite the fact it is controlled by Joesley and Wesley Batista, Brazilian brothers who have confessed to bribing hundreds of government officials in their home country
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who called on Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to reverse the JBS bailouts, blasted the Columbia Grain payouts as “appalling.”
“There is no excuse for the Trump administration’s rampant waste of taxpayer dollars,” Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Friday. “It’s no surprise that additional egregious examples have come to light. Secretary Perdue’s seeming insouciance betrays the fact that his agency has the power to prevent such an egregious misallocation of taxpayer dollars.”
Marubeni’s most serious run-in with the U.S. criminal justice system was in 2014, when it was fined $88 million after pleading guilty to taking part in a scheme to pay bribes to high-ranking government officials in Indonesia to secure a lucrative power project.
In announcing the fine, the Justice Department observed Marubeni hadn’t cooperated with the agency’s investigation when given the opportunity.
Two years earlier, the Justice Department slapped Marubeni with a $54.6 million criminal penalty after the company plead guilty to charges related to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act when the U.S. found Marubeni had taken part in a decadelong scheme to bribe Nigerian government officials to get contracts.
Both of those cases were prosecuted under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. JBS is being investigated by the Justice Department for possibly violating that same law, according to court documents.
Marubeni and its subsidiaries have also been whacked with at least 69 violations from various U.S. government agencies since 2003, including an $800,000 fine from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2015.
An Agriculture Department spokesman declined to comment on the Columbia Grain bailouts and referred to a statement Perdue issued about JBS.
The statement argued the bailouts would trickle down to U.S. farmers and downplayed criminal conduct to which the Batistas admitted.