Class action attorney slams delays in listeriosis case

Richard Spoor – who has spent six years trying to hold Tiger Brands accountable for poisoning consumers – believes SA needs an effective law enforcement system to hold corporations accountable. ‘You can’t leave it to civil society, you can’t leave it to the civil justice system. We don’t have the money, we don’t have the resources. We can be dragged out, we can be pushed around, we can be shoved off.’ A Sunday Times report says that is what has been happening since Spoor launched the class action lawsuit against the company for a listeriosis outbreak which killed 218 people and left more than 1 000 maimed between 2017 and 2018. In spite of ‘conclusive scientific evidence’, Tiger Brands has used cynical delaying tactics to evade accountability, he said. He noted the Supreme Court of Appeal made the point that the claim against Tiger Brands was based on the contaminated product it had produced. ‘Tiger had no bona fide grounds to believe that anybody else was responsible for the outbreak’, said Spoor. ‘It was an exercise that had no chance of succeeding, and that cost two years.’

In what Spoor calls another ‘cynical delaying tactic’, Tiger Brands then said it needed to examine the underlying evidence. The company has now said it needed the ‘raw data’ of the whole-genome sequencing the National Institute of Communicable Diseases had done, to check that the results were correct. ‘Now Tiger Brands is saying they’ve referred it to their experts who are reviewing it but have yet to conclude their work. The Sunday Times report notes Spoor is not holding his breath. ‘You’d imagine these experts would already be familiar with the New England Journal of Medicine article, which spells it all out. They don’t need anything more at all.’ He added the role of insurers in all this is ‘certainly a factor’ and needs to be looked at. ‘It’s in their interests to pay up as late as possible. They have the asset, it’s invested and is growing while the damages claims are not growing. There is the prospect that the plaintiff will run out of money, that the claimants will get despondent and settle cheaply.’ The insurer, Santam, owns the claim and could walk away from it if Tiger Brands admitted responsibility. ‘Once Tiger Brands pleads guilty to 218 counts of culpable homicide in a criminal court then the whole question of insurance is irrelevant,’ he said. ‘Because now your liability has been established beyond any reasonable doubt. The hold of the insurers is gone.’

Full Sunday Times report