A legal dispute over P.E.I. potatoes shipped to Argentina in 2007 has ended with a judge ordering the shipper to pay more than $118,000 to one of its suppliers. The lawsuit stems from a contract that shipper Visser Potato was trying to fill in 2007 to ship potatoes by boat to Argentina for corporate customers Garlic and Frito-Lay.
W.D. Potato provided Visser Potato with some 1,400 tonnes of potatoes for shipping as part of the load that went to Argentina. Visser Potato alleged some of the potatoes W.D. Potato provided were spoiled when they reached their destination.
In a recent decision, P.E.I. Supreme Court Justice James Gormley ruled the potatoes belonged to Visser Potato once they were loaded on the ship in Summerside and the company didn’t prove that those that were spoiled came from W.D. Potato.
Gormley ordered Visser Potato to pay W.D. Potato $118,436.51 for the outstanding balance owing for the shipment. Some issues in the case weren’t in dispute, including a price of $200 per metric tonne W.D. Potato and Visser Potato agreed to for potatoes suitable to be made into chips for Frito-Lay.
Part of the dispute was over who owned those potatoes once they were delivered to the dock in Summerside. In total, there were 3,800 metric tonnes of potatoes sent to Argentina, including those W.D. Potato provided. Of those, 180 tonnes weren’t suitable to fill the contracts once they arrived in Argentina.
Source: theguardian.pe.ca
