United States v. Archer Daniels Midland Co.

United States v. Archer Daniels Midland Co. was a criminal case filed on October 15, 1996 in which the United States alleged that Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) and other corporations and individuals engaged in a conspiracy to fix and maintain prices of lysine and citric acid and to restrain or eliminate competing suppliers of these additives in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. ADM entered into a plea agreement in which ADM pleaded guilty to both antitrust counts and agreed to pay a combined fine of $100 million ($70 million for the lysine count and $30 million for the citric acid count). This is equivalent to $ million in present-day terms and was at the time the largest antitrust fine ever imposed.

The United States' charges against ADM were the second round of charges brought as a result of the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust investigation into the food and feed additives industries. A few months earlier, in August 1996, the Japanese firms Ajinomoto Co., Inc. and Kyowa Hakko Kogyo Co. Ltd. and U.S.-based Korean subsidiary Sewon America, Inc. and their executives agreed to pay more than $20 million combined for their participation in the lysine conspiracy. The Department of Justice recovered more than $195 million in fines arising from its investigation.