Bumble Bee Foods LLC’s former Chief Executive Officer Chris Lischewski is pleading ignorance of any plans to fix prices of canned tuna in the U.S. to try to get a jury to clear him of criminal charges, Bloomberg News reported. But prosecutors claim that he conspired with other executives at rival companies on a “peace proposal” so he could boost prices and meet earnings targets set by Bumble Bee’s 2010 sale to Lion Capital. The thinly-veiled plan included coded language between executives at Bumble Bee and Starkist Co. to fix prices by “setting their own secret rules,” in which the competitors “stepped back” to accept their historical sales, and “no one is attacking anyone,” prosecutor Manish Kumar told a jury in San Francisco yesterday at the end of Lischewski’s trial. “Even though their scheme only stole a few cents at a time, those numbers added up and they added up fast,” Kumar said. San Diego-based Bumble Bee, owner of the largest North American brand of packaged seafood, filed for bankruptcy protection Nov. 21 after pleading guilty in 2017 to a felony charge of conspiring with Starkist Co. and Chicken of the Sea Inc. to fix and raise prices of canned tuna in the U.S. from 2011 through at least late 2013. Bumble Bee’s sale to Lion Capital required the company to hit $140 million in earnings to justify the acquisition price, Kumar said. The companies choreographed price increases on hundreds of millions of cans of tuna sold annually, the prosecutor said.
