Starch firm wins lawsuit for $1.4M Island Falls-bound shipment at issue

PORTLAND – A federal judge has awarded a New Jersey firm with a processing plant in Island Falls more than $1.4 million in damages after a jury-waived trial.

U.S. District Judge George Z. Singal ruled Wednesday that National Starch & Chemical Trading Co. was right to reject all of a 4,000-bag shipment of tapioca starch from Thailand in 2001 because some of the bags were found to have human feces and crushed glass in them.

The Aroostook County plant processes the tapioca starch into food starch. National Starch has a 50 percent market share in the U.S. and supplies the product to many large food companies, according to court documents.

The company and its insurer, ICHEM Insurance Co. of London, in May 2005 sued Star Shipping AS of Norway and Masterbulk PTE Ltd. of Singapore that owned the cargo ship Star Inventana, the ship on which the bags were shipped from Thailand to Portland.

Singal’s decision, issued nearly four months after a three-day trial was held in U.S. District Court in Portland, found that workers at National Starch’s Maine plant were correct in rejecting the entire shipment because the firm could not guarantee that none of the bags had glass in them.

The shipping company refused to reimburse the insurance company for the cost of the contaminated shipment. Its attorney argued at the trial that National Starch should have been able to salvage a portion of the bags.

Michael X. Savasuk, the Portland attorney who represented the plaintiffs, praised Singal’s decision in a press release issued Wednesday.

“In a sense, the judge rewarded National Starch for following its own policies,” he said. “Society demands that food manufacturers not take the calculated risk of putting society in harm’s way from the contamination of food products by glass.”

Edward S. MacColl, the Portland attorney representing Star Shipping and Masterbulk, declined to comment pending a review of the decision.