Word: adm
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...school said he held a master's degree in business from Northwestern University's prestigious Kellogg School. In fact, Whitacre earned his M.B.A. last year through mail-order courses from Kensington University in Glendale, California. A Millikin spokesman said the information about Kellogg came from "Whitacre's office" at ADM headquarters in Decatur; that left open the possibility that the company, rather than Whitacre, had pumped up his resume...
Whitacre brought that high intensity to ADM, where he arrived in 1989 after jobs as a researcher at Ralston Purina and a manager at Degussa, a German-owned chemical firm. He organized and ran ADM's fast-growing biochemical-products division. Under Whitacre's supervision the company began making the feed additive lysine in 1991; it now controls half the worldwide market. That made Whitacre a favorite of ADM chairman Dwayne Andreas and a likely successor to company president James Randall, 71. "He was very proud and excited about his work at ADM," says Combs, who kept in touch with...
...early as his first year at ADM, Whitacre told FORTUNE in a first-person account published last week, he began hearing from other managers that price fixing was an accepted practice at the com pany. His concern grew in February 1992, when Randall and vice chairman Michael ("Mick") Andreas, the son of the chairman, told Whitacre to begin working with Terrance Wilson, the president of the corn-processing division. Wilson, they said, would instruct him "about how ADM does business.'' But colleagues had warned Whitacre to be wary of Wilson because he was said to be involved in the price...
Wilson and Whitacre were soon discussing the price of lysine in talks with representatives of ADM's two biggest rivals in the field, the Japanese companies Ajinomoto and Kyowa Hakko. The Japanese were in a jam because prices had plunged from about $1.30 per lb. before ADM entered the market to about 60 cents per lb. When the group gathered at a Nikko Hotel conference room in Mexico City, Wilson stated that the price drop had created an unacceptable situation: buyers of lysine were getting a $200 million break at the expense of ADM and the Japanese producers. "The competitor...
...price-fixing deals were cut at the Mexico session. But a series of odd, unrelated events rapidly transformed Whitacre into an FBI informer. Whitacre told FORTUNE that the FBI showed up at ADM's door at the behest of Dwayne Andreas, but not in search of price fixing. The agency was called in because Andreas suspected that a saboteur was contaminating batches of lysine in ADM's fermenting process. Whitacre says agents soon questioned him about the problem and that he was instructed by Mick Andreas to lie about a few details, including which phone line he used to conduct...