In my post about Cincinnati Enquirer business reporter Jim McNair getting his controversial termination turned into a buyout, I mentioned the paper's Chiquita Brands scandal nearly 10 years ago. But I failed to note a couple more things that have been bugging me about that embarrassing episode:- To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever successfully challenged the central thrust of the Enquirier's project: that Chiquita was mistreating workers in Central America and committing a host of other corporate misdeeds. I'm quite certain that Chiquita's chairman at the time was the evil Carl Lindner Jr., a one-time part-owner of the Enquirer, who's now a wealthy industrialist and major Republican benefactor.
- Even though Chiquita walked away no doubt feeling smug after extracting from Gannett a humilating Enquirier Page One apology plus millions of dollars, the company last year agreed to a $25 million fine after admitting it paid terrorists for protection in a volatile farming region of Colombia. Nice.
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Pasted below is a link to CityBeat's (Cincy's alt-weekly) five year annniversary story of the whole banana shabang. Interesting to me, who knew very little of this matter before the posting here (thanks Jim), is how far Gannett bent over to avoid litigation. Screw the taped conversations of Chiquita execs, I would pay good money (good in relative terms to my Gannett "small to mid-sized daily" salary) to hear the taped conversations of the Gannett execs and the team of lawyers.
ReplyDeleteHere's the link:
ReplyDeletehttp://citybeat.com/2003-07-02/news2.shtml