Tuna Company StarKist Urges Court to Decertify Classes in Price-Fixing Class Action

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StarKist Tuna Price-Fixing Lawsuit Overview: 

• Who: Tuna giant StarKist is urging the Ninth Circuit court to decertify three classes of canned tuna buyers
• What: The company says that too many buyers in the price-fixing claim were not injured by the alleged scheme.
• Where: The claim was filed in California

StarKist is urging the Ninth Circuit court to decertify three classes of canned tuna buyers in a class action lawsuit that accuses the company of a price-fixing scheme to ramp up the price of the product, saying that too many buyers in the claim were not injured by the alleged scheme.

Earlier this year, a divided circuit panel ruled that the lower court had to determine the number of those in the claim that had not been injured before it certified whether predominance had been established, Law360 reports. The lawsuit had previously been broken into three Classes: direct tuna buyers, end-payors, and commercial food preparers.

However, much to StarKist’s dismay, the Ninth Circuit voted to vacate the decision and rehear the case en banc, with US Circuit Judge Paul J. Watford saying it did not matter at this point what percentage of Class Members were injured, as that would be determined later.

“The number of uninjured class members is utterly irrelevant to the predominance inquiry,” he said. “What matters is you have a common method of separating out those who are injured from those who are uninjured.”

Attorney for StarKist Gregory G. Garre told the court that at least 28 percent of Class Members could be uninjured, and argued that if the case was allowed to move forward with the uninjured Class Members individual inquiries would swamp the class claims.

StarKist Tuna Price-Fixing Allegations

The class action lawsuit comes after three of the biggest tuna companies in the US – StarKist, Chicken of the Sea, and Bumble Bee – were accused of running a price-fixing after a years-long Department of Justice investigation concluded in 2015.

One of the many lawsuits filed against the company in 2015 and 2016 said: “These price increases since the beginning of 2000 were a direct result of defendants’ conspiracy to restrict capacity, allocate customers, and fix the prices of packaged seafood in the United States. As a result, plaintiff … paid artificially inflated prices for packaged seafood purchased from the defendants.”

Did you know about the StarKist tuna price-fixing scheme? Tell us your thoughts about the conspiracy in the comments section!

The direct purchasers are represented by Christopher L. Lebsock, Michael P. Lehmann, Bonny E. Sweeney, and Samantha Stein of Hausfeld LLP.

The end-payors are represented by Thomas Burt, Betsy C. Manifold, Rachele R. Bryd, Marisa C. Livesay, and Brittany N. Dejong of Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz LLP.

The food preparers are represented by Jonathan W. Cuneo, Joel Davidow, and Blaine Finley of Cuneo Gilbert & LaLuca LLP.

The StarKist Tuna Price-Fixing Class Action Lawsuit is In re: Packaged Seafood Products Antitrust Litigation, Case No. 3:15-md-02670, in the U.S. Court for the Southern District of California.

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