We secured the dismissal of a price-fixing antitrust suit

On September 13, 2024, Judge Sarah Pitlyk of the Eastern District of Missouri granted dismissal of a multi-district antitrust litigation brought by a group of farmers against Davis Polk’s client Syngenta and several other agricultural seed and crop protection chemical manufacturers, distributors and retailers. Judge Pitlyk dismissed the federal antitrust claims with prejudice and declined to assert supplemental jurisdiction over the remaining state law claims, dismissing them without prejudice. The litigation was first filed in January 2021, and briefing on the motion to dismiss was completed in January 2022. The plaintiffs had alleged that Syngenta and its co-defendants violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act and corresponding state laws by engaging in a conspiracy to fix or stabilize prices and to boycott certain online agricultural retailers.

On the group boycott claim, Judge Pitlyk found that the plaintiffs failed to plausibly plead a conspiracy because the plaintiffs conceded that they have no direct, “smoking gun” evidence of a conspiracy and their circumstantial evidence did not show parallel conduct, which the judge ultimately concluded was alone fatal to the plaintiffs’ claim. Judge Pitlyk specifically rejected the sufficiency and relevance of the plaintiffs’ allegations of conspiracy against Syngenta. The opinion also rejects the notion that the mere membership of Syngenta (and other defendants’) executives on the same corporate boards or their participation in the same industry organizations supports an inference of conspiratorial conduct.

The complaint also included Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act claims, which the court rejected largely on the basis that the plaintiffs did not allege underlying mail or wire fraud predicates with particularity, and instead only generically asserted that the defendants must have used the mail or wires to accomplish the purportedly fraudulent conspiracy.

Finally, Judge Pitlyk specified that she was dismissing all federal claims with prejudice because, although the defendants had filed motions to dismiss in certain actions underlying the multi-district litigation, thereby putting the plaintiffs on notice of their deficiencies in their claims, the plaintiffs failed to correct those deficiencies in the consolidated amended complaint.

The Davis Polk team included partners Ronan P. Harty, Paul S. Mishkin, Michael Scheinkman and Jesse Solomon, counsel Benjamin M. Miller and associates Marie Killmond and Cody Donald. Members of the Davis Polk team are based in the New York and Washington DC offices.

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