EAST ST. LOUIS – Syngenta denies that it boycotted Farmer’s Business Network as part of a conspiracy, stating it doesn’t deal with the network because the network stole the secrets of its seeds.
In an antitrust claim suit against Syngenta in U.S. district court, its counsel Paul Mishkin of New York City asserted “unique and entirely lawful reasons” for the company’s conduct.
Mishkin moved to dismiss the claim on May 5.
He cited a suit in Minnesota district court claiming Farmer’s Business Network and two former Syngenta Seeds employees misappropriated information.
He claimed a party has ample reason not to deal with a litigation adversary.
Minnesota District Judge Eric Tostrud found Syngenta’s claim plausible in February, and mostly denied a motion to dismiss it.
He dismissed some claims but granted leave to amend them.
On the day Syngenta moved to dismiss suits in the Illinois court, Troy Bozarth of Edwardsville filed a joint motion to dismiss all 16 defendants.
The list includes manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers.
Bozarth claimed the complaints lumped them together without identifying what they did to enter a group boycott.
“For some defendants, the complaint alleges no specific conduct at all,” Bozarth wrote.
The suit would benefit Farmer’s Business Network, but the network didn’t file it.
Stephen Tillery’s firm in St. Louis filed it for individual farmers, claiming access to seeds and supplies online would cause prices to fall.
The farmers sought an order voiding all contracts among all defendants.
They asserted a right to buy from Farmer’s Business Network and another online source, but the owner of the other one said he didn’t want its name in the suit.
The network started with capital of investors who previously supported California businesses that grew to dominate their fields.
Primary investor Kleiner Perkins identifies former vice president Al Gore as senior partner and former secretary of state Colin Powell as strategic adviser.
The network hired scientists away from Syngenta without controversy until Todd Warner resigned as chief of breeding data analysis for Syngenta Seeds.
Syngenta sued him in Minnesota last June, for an order requiring inspection of his devices and identification of those to whom he provided secrets.
Syngenta counsel Kerry Bundy of Minneapolis wrote that Warner was “on garden leave,” meaning Syngenta paid him in a non competition period.
She claimed he accepted a position with the network in May.
“Shortly thereafter, a forensic investigation uncovered, among other things, Warner’s wholesale and unlawful transfer of Syngenta’s trade secrets and confidential information from the network to various external devices,” she wrote.
“This information allows competitors such as Farmer’s Business Network to create new products for the marketplace without the significant investment required for Syngenta to develop its innovative products.”
She claimed Warner traveled to California and maintained communication with former Syngenta employees including senior breeding lead Joshua Sleper.
“Warner’s technology usage in the months leading up to his departure were systematically calculated to place sensitive information outside of Syngenta’s controlled information technology environment,” she wrote.
She claimed compensatory and punitive damages.
In October, after initial discovery, she amended the complaint to seek damages from Farmer’s Business Network and Sleper.
Defense counsel Claude Stern of Redwood Shores, Calif., discounted the complaint as an unremarkable event of employees seeking employment.
He found the allegations so broad, circular, and categorical as to be meaningless.
He claimed Warner isn’t a network employee and never has been.
He claimed Syngenta left defendants guessing what secrets are at issue.
“It is not sufficient for plaintiff to speculate about what could happen if information to which Sleper and Warner had rightful access were hypothetically disclosed to or used with Farmer’s Business Network,” Stern wrote.
He claimed Syngenta failed to demonstrate that it lost money or property.
Bundy replied that Warner and Sleper met with the network in early 2019, and hatched a plan to stay at Syngenta while harvesting information.
While judge Tostrud deliberated, Syngenta discovered that Sleper deleted from his personal device material he retained as a Syngenta employee.
Bundy moved for leave to file a brief about it, and Judge Tostrud granted it.
In his ruling on the motion to dismiss, he found the destruction occurred in October but defendants didn’t disclose it until Dec. 30, after Syngenta filed its response.
He mostly denied the motion, finding Syngenta described some secrets with enough particularity for the pleading stage.
“It is undoubtedly plausible that this type of competitive information would derive value from its secrecy, and Syngenta extensively describes the security measures that it took to protect it,” Tostrud wrote.
He found that shortly after Warner interviewed with the network, employees there presented a breeding plan to the chief executive.
He found Syngenta believed it contained information from Warner and Sleper.
He dismissed some claims and found factors in favor of doing so with prejudice, but ruled that discovery could proceed on them while Bundy amends the complaint.
He found the late breaking revelations about Sleper’s alleged destruction showed that discovery didn’t reveal all relevant information.
“All of this suggests that new information implicating Sleper and Farmer’s Business Network could come to light,” he wrote.
In March, Magistrate Judge Becky Thorson resolved discovery disputes mostly in Syngenta’s favor.
She ordered Sleper to give Syngenta all documents he provided to the network related to his work at Syngenta.
She ordered the network to identify all Syngenta information that Warner, Sleper, and two other former Syngenta employees provided.
She ordered the network to provide all communications with the four former employees regarding their contractual or legal obligations to Syngenta.
She ordered the network to identify all current or former Syngenta employees who have been recruited by the network, applied to it, or worked there.
Thorson set a conference on a discovery dispute Thursday, May 13.
In the Illinois action, as Bozarth moved to dismiss all defendants, three of them besides Syngenta separately moved to dismiss for reasons of their own.
For wholesaler Univar, Craig Martin of Chicago claimed plaintiffs failed to allege even an opportunity to conspire.
He claimed they focused on actions of Univar Canada, which isn’t a defendant.
For wholesaler Cargill, Eric Mahr of Washington claimed a statute of limitations barred the suit.
He claimed the only allegation that a Cargill entity took any action at all mistakenly described Cargill as a manufacturer.
For Canadian wholesaler Federated Cooperatives, Michael McCluggage of Chicago challenged U.S. jurisdiction.
“There is an utter absence of allegations that Federated Cooperatives engaged in conduct within or aimed at the United States, let alone conduct relating to plaintiffs’ claims,” McCluggage wrote.
Bozarth wrote in the group motion that plaintiffs didn’t show how they were injured or how electronic platforms would impact competition.
“The only conduct in the United States that plaintiffs attribute to specific defendants is limited to Farmer’s Business Network, is consistent with rational independent conduct, and does not indicate the existence of any agreement to boycott,” Bozarth wrote.
“It makes sense that a retailer would choose not to deal with a new rival that intends to compete with it.”
In regard to defendant Growmark, he wrote, “Naturally cooperatives and their owners might not want to drive sales to a competitor.”
He claimed some products are hazardous and it’s in a manufacturer’s interest to exert control over the manner in which they are sold and serviced.
Chief District Judge Nancy Rosenstengel presides.