Court Opinion

ID: 9442538
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 18:51:00.995995+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:07.612108
License: Public Domain

MAJOR, Chief Judge,
dissenting.
The opinion of Judge Sullivan who tried this case in the District Court is reported. Swift & Co. v. Reconstruction Finance Corp., D.C., 79 F.Supp. 546. In that opinion is an accurate statement of the facts and issues involved. In the main I agree with the reasoning by which he arrived at the conclusion that the court had jurisdiction under Section 2(m) of the Emergency Price Control Act and that plaintiff was entitled to prevail on the merits. Such being the case, no good purpose could be served by any extended discussion on my part.
The jurisdictional issue depends upon whether the subsidies were those “relating to the production or sale of agricultural commodities * * * ” within the language of Section 2(m), as urged by the plaintiff, or whether they were subsidies on processed meat, as claimed by the defendant. In my judgment, they clearly fall within the former category, as found by Judge Sullivan. In fact, the record furnishes ample grounds for the belief that the position now taken by the defendant was an afterthought, designed to meet the exigencies of a law suit. At any rate, the defendant paid to the plaintiff more than $1,300,000 on the latter’s subsidy claim, apparently before it became aware that the subsidy was on processed meat and, therefore, not recoverable on such meat as remained in plaintiff’s storage at the expiration of price controls. To me, this is an astounding situation explainable only on the basis that the position which defendant now takes was conceived long after its liability to the plaintiff had by its own directives become definitely established.
Of course, I realize that the predicament in which defendant now finds itself is not decisive of the legal issues presented. However, its belated discovery is significant in that prior thereto it recognized what its directives plainly proclaimed and what the industry and everybody concerned therewith must have understood, that is, that *462the subsidy payable to the slaughterers was for the benefit of livestock producers so as to stimulate production, and that such payments were required to be passed on to the producers.
I would affirm the judgment.