Word: seaboards
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That's when the process began by which the fairy tale turned into a very bad dream. Just four years later, in 1994, Seaboard phased out the plant and moved its hog-slaughtering operations to another town 800 miles away, which came up with an even larger corporate-welfare package. Albert Lea was left saddled with debt, higher utility bills and an abandoned slaughterhouse. The entire episode, says City Manager Paul Sparks, was a "disaster...
...Seaboard is a publicly owned company, but in fact it is the fiefdom of a reclusive Boston-area family (more on that later). A sort of mini-conglomerate, Seaboard has interests in hogs, strawberries, chickens, shrimp, salmon, flour and wine. Its operations span four continents and nearly two dozen countries and range from cargo ocean liners to sugarcane. And like other profitable businesses, it collects subsidies--or, more accurately, corporate welfare--from local, state and federal governments. Indeed, officials trip over one another in the rush to extend taxpayer support to Seaboard--from the Federal Government's Overseas Private Investment...
...closeup view of Seaboard, let's begin with Albert Lea. For most of this century, Wilson Foods operated that pork plant and was the town's largest employer. Wilson fell on hard times in the early 1980s, cut workers' average annual pay from $22,200 to $16,600 and eventually sold the plant to Farmstead Foods. In turn, that company went belly-up a few years later, after it lost its biggest customer--Wilson. Then, in December 1990, just as workers were receiving the last of their unemployment checks, Seaboard appeared...
...deposition, Robohm recounted the time a top Seaboard executive dropped by his office to ask whether he had set aside money for Bresky in a contract that was being negotiated for a manufacturing plant in Nigeria. Robohm recalled the meeting...
...litigation dragged on for four years. Finally, in 1994, the lawsuit was settled when Seaboard Flour and the Breskys, without admitting "any liability or wrongdoing," agreed to pay $10.8 million to Seaboard Corp. For practical purposes, that meant the Breskys transferred money from the family-owned Seaboard Flour to the publicly traded but still family-controlled Seaboard Corp...