Court finds Indian-American not guilty in labour market conspiracy case
Darpan News Desk IANS, 03 May, 2023 12:12 PM
New York, May 3 (IANS) An Indian-origin executive of an aerospace engineering company in the US, and several other officials were found not guilty of conspiring to limit workers' mobility and career prospects, media reports said.
US District Judge Victor Bolden said the Department of Justice (DOJ) failed to prove that former Pratt & Whitney executive Mahesh Patel and five others restrained trade by forging an eight-year "no-poach" agreement to refrain from recruiting and hiring one another's employees, the Hartford Courant reported.
Bolden said that the evidence shows the companies hired so many of one another's employees under agreed upon exceptions to the no-poach deal that it was effectively meaningless.
"Under these circumstances, the alleged agreement itself had so many exceptions that it could not be said to meaningfully allocate the labor market of engineers from the supplier companies working on Pratt and Whitney projects," Bolden wrote.
"Indeed, many engineers or other skilled labourers were hired between and among the supplier companies during the relevant time period."
A federal grand jury in Connecticut indicted Patel, a Pratt & Whitney employee for 26 years, in 2021 along with with Harpreet Wasan, Steven Houghtaling and Tom Edwards, all of Connecticut; and Robert Harvey of South Carolina and Gary Prus, of Florida -- executives of Pratt suppliers.
According to the indictment, the defendants and co-conspirators recognised the mutual financial benefit of the conspiracy -- namely, reducing the rise in labor costs that would occur when aerospace workers were free to find new employment in a competitive environment.
Patel and certain other co-conspirators explicitly appealed to this financial benefit when communicating with each other about the agreement, a DOJ release had stated.
Patel was described as the "enforcer" of an agreement among the companies in Connecticut and elsewhere to hold down costs by not competing for and hiring one another's engineers.
The charges were the result of an ongoing federal antitrust investigation into labour market allocation in the aerospace engineering services industry.
"I am grateful that justice prevailed for Patel and that his innocence has been so firmly established," Brian Spears, defence lawyer said.
Ardern, who became the youngest female head of government in the world when she was elected Prime Minister in 2017 at the age of 37, said that the six "challenging" years in the job had taken a toll.
The victims have been identified as Rosa Parraz (72), Eladio Parraz Jr (52), Jennifer Analla (50), Marcos Parraz (19), Elyssa Parraz (16) and Nycholas Parraz (10 months), reports the BBC. The house is located in Goshen, Tulare County.
During a speech on Tuesday at a White House celebration for the NBA champion Golden State Warriors, Biden said: "As 'CAM-a-la' said, we're all closely monitoring the storms, the floods, the landslides all across California." Biden -- the oldest-ever president at 80 -- is set to launch a 2024 re-election campaign, even as detractors question his 'mental acuity'.
Police found open cans of alcohol in Sukhpreet Singh's car after he was followed through a Derbyshire town swerving across lanes in November last year. The Southern Derbyshire Magistrates' Court heard that Singh, a Pizza Hut worker and a resident of Higher Albert Street, Chesterfield, was driving without a license.
The bullet discharged from a 9-mm handgun when Smith used it to strike the other man. It missed the man but went into the apartment and struck Mya in the head before grazing her mother, the Times reported. Mya was rushed to a nearby hospital, where she battled for three days before being declared dead on March 23.
Rapinder Kaur, 36, said she, her turban-wearing husband and their two-year-old child were subjected to racial taunts by guards during a visit to the castle last year, The Independent reported.
