The District Court judge overseeing a massive price-fixing lawsuit against chicken companies said on Wednesday that he would extend a stay of discovery in that case to make way for a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice. A prior stay, which the DOJ was granted in June, was set to expire Friday.
The price-fixing lawsuit was brought in 2016 and unites a collection of the country’s biggest food retailers and distributors, led by Maplevale Farms, which allege that poultry companies worked together between 2008 and 2016 to artificially hike the price of chicken. The suit joins others brought by farmers and consumers in pointing to a secretive data-sharing company, Agri Stats, as a tool of alleged collusion in the poultry sector.
The government first asked in the spring for a six-month stay of discovery in the Maplevale case “to protect [its own] grand jury’s investigation.” Judge Thomas M. Durkin of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois granted the government just a three-month stay, which would have expired Friday.
On Sept. 20, the DOJ filed a motion to extend the stay by another six months, until March 27, 2020. It argued that “significant developments in the criminal investigation” warranted an additional pause. In a hearing on Wednesday, Judge Durkin said he would extend the stay for at least another three months, according to Law360.
The stay in discovery will delay scheduled depositions in the Maplevale case. The DOJ argued that allowing both discovery processes to move ahead at the same time could create difficulties for both plaintiffs and defendants. Judge Durkin said Wednesday that his primary goal is for the cases to proceed without disturbing each other.
Ahold Delhaize, one of the plaintiffs in the Maplevale suit, filed a motion against the extended stay, arguing that the company “already anticipates it will be several years before it can take this case … to trial.” It also argued that the longer plaintiffs have to wait to proceed with their own discovery, the more likely it is that they will confront obstacles like lost documents or unavailable or ill potential witnesses.
FERN broke the news in June that the DOJ had intervened in the lawsuit. At the time, antitrust experts said that this unusual step signaled that the DOJ investigation could lead to criminal indictments. FERN also recently published a story, in collaboration with The Guardian, about an investigation into Agri Stats and allegations that poultry companies can use the data company’s services to collude to suppress farmer wages.