Legal News

Kosher Meat Plant Rides Bankruptcy Wave; ?It?s Chaos Out There?

By Dan Slater

First there was an immigration raid, followed by hundreds of convictions of illegal immigrants. Then an array of state and federal charges against the owners for alleged child labor and immigration violations. The latest: bankruptcy.

The company is Agriprocessors Inc., the embattled kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. The Tuesday bankruptcy filing in the Eastern District of New York, reported today by the New York Times, apparently followed a decline in demand for Agriprocessors’ meat, which is sold under the Aaron’s Best and Shor Harbor labels. At the same time, however, kosher meat retailers reported shortages of kosher meat this week, after the plant stopped slaughtering cattle a week ago. The company was built by the father-son team of Aaron and Sholom Rubashkin.

“It’s chaos out there; the shortage is all over the country,” Menachem Lubinsky, the editor of koshertoday.com, told the NYT. “Everybody has begun to scramble.”

Blaming “difficult circumstances involving a raid” for its financial woes, Agriprocessors said it was seeking new financing to restructure its business. “We are filing this to reinvigorate the company,” said Agriprocessors’s lawyer in the bankruptcy, Kevin J. Nash.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on November 06, 2008 (boomark / email).