During the two-month period between his January nomination and March confirmation as Donald Trump’s secretary of agriculture, Sonny Perdue made a sweetheart real estate deal with a multi-conglomerate whose business interests would be part of his domain, according to a new investigation by The Washington Post.
In February 2017, a company Perdue owned paid $250,000 to Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) for a small grain plant in South Carolina. That represented a steep discount from the price initially sought: $4 million, or 16 times the final sale figure.
The plant’s equipment alone was worth millions on the resale market. Indeed, one of Purdue employees told The Post that the boiler was resold for twice the price they paid for the entire property. Equipment acquired in the deal that’s used to store grain is valued in the seven figures.
The Post sums it up:
The timing of the sale just as Perdue was about to become the most powerful man in U.S. agriculture raises legal and ethics concerns, from the narrow question of whether the secretary followed federal financial disclosure requirements to whether the transaction could have been an attempt to influence an incoming government official, in violation of bribery statutes, ethics lawyers say.
In 2011, ADM, a food processing giant, acquired the plant in Estill, S.C. for $5.5 million. By the time they were looking to unload the property, its value had held steady. Two independent appraisers agreed that it was worth $5.7 million by 2017.
So why did Perdue pay a fraction of that estimate?
“This stinks to high heaven,” Julie O’Sullivan, a Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor, told The Post. “It deserves a prosecutor’s attention.”
ADM, which spends millions annually on lobbying, would benefit from Perdue’s tenure as secretary of agriculture. He loosened regulations on pork production, which was a boon to ADM’s grain business (pigs eat grain). More alarmingly, Purdue approved subsidies that added hundreds of millions to ADM’s bottom line. The Post provides details:
In early 2020, at the onset of the coronavirus crisis, Perdue announced a $100 million subsidy of biofuels, including ethanol and biodiesel.
The subsidies and tax credit helped. On Jan. 29, 2020, ADM trumpeted quarterly earnings of $504 million.
More than half of that profit — $270 million — came from the biodiesel tax credit.
Purdue was supposed to disclose any potential conflicts of interest, but he obscured his business dealings behind layers of complicated trusts. Per an agreement with a government watchdog, one such trust was “irrevocable,” meaning it couldn’t be reversed. But it was.
“This may be a matter for the FBI to investigate, frankly,” Walter Shaub, who led the Office of Government Ethics in 2017 and signed off on Perdue’s forms, told The Post.
Purdue is no stranger to running afoul of regulators tasked with eliminating potential conflicts of interest. The former governor of Georgia was twice found to have violated state ethics laws. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he once signed a bill that included a middle-of-the-night amendment that saved him $100,000 in taxes.