Another restaurant is suing America’s major tuna producers, accusing them of price fixing and bringing the total number of lawsuits filed in a month with similar accusations to nine.
Harvesters Enterprises, which does business as Harvester’s Seafood and Steakhouse, is a restaurant in Lexington, Miss., USA. The company filed suit last week against Bumble Bee Foods, StarKist and Tri-Union Seafoods, the subsidiary of Thai Union Frozen Products (TUF) that sells tuna in the United States under the brand Chicken of the Sea.
Harvesters accused the three companies of using their collective dominant position to conspire to fix prices, declining to lower them even with evidence that seafood consumption in the United States had dropped.
“Defendants’ unlawful activities took place within and substantially affected the flow of interstate commerce and had a direct, substantial and reasonably foreseeable effect upon commerce in the United States, its territories and the District of Columbia,” the suit stated.
This is the ninth lawsuit filed in August accusing the companies of conspiring to fix prices. Another restaurant, a sandwich shop in Washington, D.C., filed a similar suit, and the remaining suits came from various distribution companies and individual consumer seeking class-action judgments.
