An FBI informant used forged documents and a dummy consulting company to steal millions of dollars while he was an executive of Archer Daniels Midland Co., the company says in documents filed with a Swiss court.
ADM is suing former company vice president Mark Whitacre in Switzerland, saying Whitacre deposited $6.25 million in stolen money into Swiss bank accounts. ADM said it happened in 1994 and 1995, when Whitacre was working as an undercover informant for a federal price-fixing probe.Whitacre has said the payments were approved by high-level ADM management as under-the-table compensation for top executives. He has said he told federal officials about secret company payments in August, when ADM fired him and said he stole money.
The battle between ADM and Whitacre has been preoccupying the company, a powerful and publicity-sensitive giant of the grain processing industry that calls itself the supermarket to the world. The affair was a main topic at ADM's annual meeting last week, where directors were questioned sharply by shareholders about it.
Whitacre declined comment on the Swiss lawsuit when reached at his suburban Chicago office Monday. His lawyer, James Epstein, did not return a telephone message seeking comment Monday.
The company's lawsuit, filed in Zurich last week, accuses Whitacre of producing phony documents to support his requests for millions of dollars from ADM. Whitacre funneled the money to a consulting company he set up with the help of a Swiss lawyer, court documents said.
Company officials, who provided the documents to a reporter, said the company would not comment beyond that.
The first transaction happened in May 1994 in connection with ADM's plans to produce threonine, a livestock feed additive. In 1992, ADM bought the rights to a bacterial process to make the chemical from a Swedish company, ABP International, for $3.1 million.
In 1994, ABP International developed a better strain of threonine-producing bacteria by re-mov-ing a gene making it resistant to the antibiotic ampicillin, the court documents contend.
ADM's documents said Whitacre drew up a fake contract with ABP International to buy the new bacteria for $2.5 million and filled out a wire transfer request for the money. But instead of going to ABP International, the $2.5 million went into the Swiss account of ABP Consulting Ltd., the firm Whitacre set up with Schweizer, the lawsuit said.