F.T.C. v. Elders Grain, Inc.

• Decision Date: 30 January 1989
• Docket Number: 88-2494,Nos. 88-2493,s. 88-2493
• Citation: 868 F.2d 901
• Parties: , 1989-1 Trade Cases 68,411 FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. ELDERS GRAIN, INC. and Illinois Cereal Mills, Inc., Defendants-Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 901

868 F.2d 901

57 USLW 2469, 1989-1 Trade Cases 68,411

FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. ELDERS GRAIN, INC. and Illinois Cereal Mills, Inc.,

Defendants-Appellants.

Nos. 88-2493, 88-2494.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued Nov. 3, 1988.

Decided Jan. 30, 1989.

James H. Sneed, Eugene J. Meigher, Arent, Fox, Kintner, Poltkin & Kahn, Washington, D.C., for defendants-appellants.

David C. Shonka, Federal Trade Com'n, Washington, D.C., for plaintiff-appellee.

Before POSNER and RIPPLE, Circuit Judges, and ESCHBACH, Senior Circuit Judge.

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

The parties to an acquisition appeal from a preliminary injunction, issued upon the application of the Federal Trade Commission, that ordered them to rescind the acquisition pending administrative proceedings to determine whether it violates section 7 of the Clayton Act, as amended, 15 U.S.C. Sec. 18. Section 7 forbids corporate acquisitions that may lessen competition substantially or tend to create a monopoly. The appeals raise antitrust issues under section 7, primarily concerning the definition of the geographical market, and procedural and remedial issues under section 13(b) of the Federal Trade Commission Act, 15 U.S.C. Sec. 53(b). Section 13(b) authorizes the Commission to seek a preliminary injunction against the violation of a statute (such as section 7 of the Clayton Act) enforced by the Commission, pending administrative proceedings, and authorizes a federal district judge to grant the injunction "upon a proper showing that, weighing the equities and considering the Commission's likelihood of ultimate success, such action would be in the public interest."

Illinois Cereal Mills is a principal manufacturer of "industrial dry corn," a type of processed corn sold to manufacturers of corn flakes, corn bread, doughnuts, beer, and other food products. ICM's two mills are in Illinois and Indiana. On June 5 of last year it bought from Elders Grain the Lincoln Grain Company, which manufactures industrial dry corn at a mill in Atchison, Kansas. At the time, ICM and Lincoln were the second and fifth largest producers of industrial dry corn in the United States. The acquisition made ICM the largest, with a market share of 32 percent (up from 23 percent before the acquisition). There are only four other significant producers of industrial dry corn. The Commission learned on June 2 that the acquisition was scheduled to be consummated on June 7, and on June 3 it gave ICM and Elders written notice of its intention to challenge the acquisition and to seek rescission if the acquisition was consummated before an injunction could be obtained. ICM and Elders moved up the closing to June 5 (a Sunday). The Commission filed suit the next day.

After a two-day evidentiary hearing, the district judge on June 24 issued a preliminary injunction that orders the transaction rescinded until the Commission concludes its administrative proceeding to determine whether the acquisition violated section 7. 691 F.Supp. 1131 (N.D.Ill. 1988). The district judge has stayed the preliminary injunction pending appeal, but an order that he entered at the conclusion of the evidentiary hearing forbidding ICM to alter the operations of the Atchison mill remains in effect. The administrative proceeding before the FTC is in the pretrial discovery phase; the defendants have requested a year to complete discovery.

Section 13(b) of the Federal Trade Commission Act directs the district judge, in passing on a request by the FTC for an injunction pending administrative proceedings, to weigh the equities and determine the Commission's ultimate likelihood of success. Such a directive is rather empty without specification of how the evaluation of the equities and the evaluation of the merits (i.e., ultimate likelihood of success) are to be combined, a matter on which the scanty legislative history of section 13(b) is silent. The case law (also scanty) contains such statements as, "When the Commission demonstrates a likelihood of ultimate success, a countershowing of private equities alone would not suffice to justify denial of a preliminary injunction barring the merger." FTC v. Weyerhaeuser Co., 665 F.2d 1072, 1083 (D.C.Cir.1981) (footnote omitted); see also FTC v. Warner Communications, Inc., 742 F.2d 1156, 1165 (9th Cir.1984). No one could quarrel with this statement, which this court endorsed in an opinion issued several days after the oral argument in the present case, see FTC v. World Travel Vacation Brokers, Inc., 861 F.2d 1020, 1028 (7th Cir.1988). But it may say less than it seems to say. While not giving controlling weight to "private equities"--of course not--the cases give them some weight; and the court in Warner quite properly observed that "private injuries are entitled to serious consideration." Id. In World Travel we interpreted the previous cases to be saying that the FTC need not prove irreparable injury to obtain a preliminary injunction. It is not inconsistent with that interpretation to add that if the defendant can show irreparable injury to it from the grant of the injunction, then merits and harms must be evaluated in the usual way--to which we turn next.

In suits under antitrust statutes that are silent on the standard for granting or denying preliminary injunctions, we and other courts have used a "sliding scale" approach. See, e.g., Roland Machinery Co. v. Dresser Industries, Inc., 749 F.2d 380 (7th Cir.1984); cf. Lawson Products, Inc. v. Avnet, Inc., 782 F.2d 1429, 1434 (7th Cir.1986). The greater the plaintiff's likelihood of success on the merits when those merits are ultimately determined after a full trial (in this case, after a full administrative proceeding before the FTC, followed by judicial review if the acquisition is held to violate section 7 and the parties to the acquisition petition for judicial review in one of the courts of appeals), the less harm from denial of the preliminary injunction the plaintiff need show in relation to the harm that the defendant will suffer if the preliminary injunction is granted. So, for example, if the balance of harms is even, the plaintiff is entitled to the injunction upon a showing that he has a better than 50 percent chance of winning. Given the desirability of having a uniform standard for preliminary injunctions in antitrust cases and perhaps in all cases, we believe that the Roland standard--the sliding-scale approach just sketched--is appropriate for requests for preliminary injunctions under section 13(b) of the FTC Act, in cases where defendants are able to show that a preliminary injunction would do them irreparable harm.

The district judge thought the FTC likely to succeed on the merits. He then weighed the harms in the balance, and the balance tipped against the acquisition. He thought, in fact, that the public interest in preventing an anticompetitive acquisition could not be outweighed by what he described as the defendants' purely private financial interests in completing the acquisition. By doing this he collapsed the issue of equity or relative harm into the merits, for his view was that an anticompetitive acquisition is against the public interest and private interests can never trump public ones. This is not the best way to analyze the equities in an antitrust case or any other kind of case. First of all, public and private interests are not altogether distinct, since in many situations the public interest is merely the aggregation of private interests. Ours is not a society in which the state is normally assumed to have interests distinct from those of its citizens. The public interest in enforcing the antitrust laws is, in the main, the sum of the private interests of consumers in being able to buy goods and services at a competitive price. Of course, as the cases we cited earlier state, the pecuniary interests of the defendants should not be given controlling weight in deciding whether a preliminary injunction should be issued. However, what would be ignored by so truncated an inquiry into the effects of granting the injunction would not be a mystical or transcendent "public interest" but another set of pecuniary interests--those of the consumers who might be hurt by the challenged transaction.

It is always better to avoid relying on vague concepts and instead to ask concretely who would be helped and who hurt by a proposed action: here, who would be helped and who would be hurt by allowing--and who by forbidding--a challenged acquisition to go through before what are often protracted administrative proceedings are completed. In other words, what are the consequences of the alternative courses of action that the district judge might take? If the acquisition seems anticompetitive, then failing to stop it during the administrative proceedings will deprive consumers and suppliers of the benefits of competition pendente lite and perhaps forever, for it is difficult to undo a merger years after it has been consummated.

That difficulty is not merely theoretical in the present case. It is a speculative question whether several years from now, if the acquisition is held to violate section 7, Lincoln Grain Company will either be able to stand on its own or be attractive to a company from outside the industrial dry corn industry--for if it is sold to one of the four other firms in the industry, the number of competitors will be no greater than if the present acquisition is upheld, although concentration will be lower if the buyer is smaller than ICM. Elders, which is not a member of the industry, obtained Lincoln as part of a larger deal, and was eager to sell it. It is not likely to want to buy it back in several years. After several years of tutelage by ICM, even under the district court's freeze order entered on June 10 Lincoln may not be able to reenter the industry as a vigorous independent competitor. On the other side of the balance, the defendants argue...