Posted on 08/20/2009 9:39:47 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
SACRAMENTO -- A former official of a major California tomato processor has agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy charges involving bribes paid to food companies, the first charges against a senior executive of the firm at the center of a federal corruption investigation, prosecutors said Wednesday.
Jeffrey Beasley, former vice president for industrial sales at SK Foods in Monterey, will admit that he took part in plans to pay the bribes and ship tomato products with misleading content labels, inferior quality and inflated prices, the U.S. attorney's office in Sacramento said.
A former SK Foods sales broker, Randall Rahal, has pleaded guilty to price-fixing and racketeering and admitted bribing employees of Kraft Foods, Frito-Lay and B&G Foods.
Purchasing managers for those companies have pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from Rahal. Former Kraft employee Robert L. Watson was sentenced last week to two years and three months in prison and ordered to pay $1.85 million in restitution to Kraft.
SK Foods produces about 15 percent of the bulk tomato paste sold to U.S. makers of salsa, ketchup and juices.
Prosecutors have described the company as a racketeering enterprise but have not charged it with any crimes. One employee, Jennifer Dahlman, a former records and business analyst, pleaded guilty in February to falsifying shipping documents on tomato products with high mold content.
A lawyer for SK Foods has said the firm did nothing wrong.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
And to think, you can’t take a tomato out of your garden, off of your property and sell it at a farmer’s market, because Obama claims it ‘may make you sick’....well he is trying to get that into law via the FDA. So he will control, the banks, the auto’s, healthcare, food, insurance, your diet, the energy industry, how warm or cold you can keep your home......Take God out of everything, his pictures all over everything, the media only reporting what he says they can report, all the while en slaving you your children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, for your own good of course....STAND UP FOR AMERICA OR LOSE HER, WHICH MEANS LOSE FREEDOM.
Having been involved in the vegetable business I’d say that it is more crooked than the mafia, I wouldn’t doubt if they are involved.
At some point, probably in the not too distant future, people will suddenly wake up to how intrusive government has become, to what an absurd degree the loss of autonomy has progressed, and they will begin reasserting their personhood en masse by simply ignoring most laws. You’ll get a rapid breakdown of the old order, kind of like in the Soviet satellite states. Of course in the short term it will be propped up by ever increasing use of force, but that will fail.
You are on a tomato roll today!
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