General Motors Loses Appeal In FCA Conspiracy Lawsuit!

The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati has upheld a 2020 ruling to throw out a racketeering lawsuit filed against Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) now Stellantis by General Motors (GM).

GM filed the lawsuit back in November 2019, saying that FCA bribed union officials of the United Auto Workers (UAW) for a number of years to gain benefits during the bargaining process between the automakers and the unions, thus causing GM to issue similar changes in its negotiations, thus causing GM to lose billions of dollars. 

U.S. District Court Judge Paul Borman in Detroit dismissed GM’s lawsuit in the summer of 2020. GM appealed the decision leading to another decision, this time by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Even admitting GM’s theory to be true, the chain of causality between FCA’s bribes and GM’s hard is still too softened,” said the jury of three judges of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“GM’s lawsuits are meritless as we have said all along,” Stellantis spokesperson Shawn Morgan said in an issued statement. “We welcome today’s unanimous decision by the Federal Court of Appeals upholding the district court’s dismissal of this baseless claim. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously against these frivolous allegations and we will not be distracted from our focus on competing and winning in the marketplace.”

The court stated that “The chain leading from FCA’s bribe to GM’s increased labor costs had to pass through the independent actions of at least two independent parties — the FCA and GM workforces.”  The court also found that GM, “failed to show that the predicate acts directly caused its 2015 pattern-bargaining injuries. The district court did not err by dismissing GM’s complaint on causation grounds.”

GM continued to disagree with the ruling, which “merely holds that GM may not utilize the federal RICO statute to recover the damages caused by Stellantis through the admitted bribery and fraud of FCA,” GM spokesperson Maria Raynal said in an official press release. “Our claims, however, are much broader than RICO and are based on theories, including unfair competition, that the 6th Circuit identified as appropriate means of redress.  We will continue to pursue our case against FCA and the other defendants in the Michigan state court to recover the damages caused to GM as a result of FCA’s admitted corruption.”

Source: The Detroit News