Top U.S. court refuses to halt anti-trust suit

Press, 3 June 1981, Page 9

Top U.S. court refuses to halt anti-trust suit

NZPA-Reuter Washington The United States Supreme Court, brushing aside assertions that America’s foreign relations were suffering, yesterday refused to half an anti-trust suit aimed at an international uranium cartel. The Justices, without a written opinion, declined to tell a Federal judge in Chicago to end the legal proceedings. In asking for the rarely granted order, Gulf Oil Corporation and Gulf Minerals (Canada). Ltd, two of the defendants in the suit, alleged that the cartel was shielded from American courts’ scrutiny because its actions were “mandated” by the countries involved — Canada, France, South Africa and Australia. The price-and-supply-con-trolling cartel of uranium producers worked between 1972 and 1975, and has sparked numerous other lawsuits. “An affront to.the dignity and rights of friendly sovereign States is occurring now. Damage to the foreign relations of the United States is being inflicted now,” lawyers for Gulf Oil and Gulf Minerals told the Supreme Court, i The two corporations alleged that American antitrust law should not be applied to the foreign “regulatory actions” involved in the dispute. In the suit, the Tennessee Valley Authority accused the participants in the cartel, among other things, of illegally fixing prices for uranium and boycotting the Authority and other producers of nuclear-generated electricity Hie Authority alleged that it had been harmed by three

contracts it entered into tor the delivery of 21 million pounds Of uranium between 1976 and 1990. Charles van Beke, a T.V.A. lawyer, declined to say how much it -sought in money damages, except that it would be "over $lOO million.” The Authority settled with several other defendants in the suit for $2 million, the renegotiation of one contract and revocation of another, Mr , van Beke said. The Governments of the four countries involved in the cartel strenuously objected to being drawn into the proceedings and attempts to obtain key documents from them. In December Federal District Judge Prentice Marshall in Chicago said he would go forward with pretrial manoeuvres anyway, in preparation for a trial before a different judge. He refused a request by Gulf Oil and Gulf Minerals to end the suit in their favour. Judge Marshall said that during the trial the companies could raise the assertions that their actions were shielded because they were carried out as official policies of the countries involved. In opposing the request for a Supreme Court order, the Justice Department, representing the T.V.A., said the same decree could be sought from the seventh Un-' ited States Circuit Court of Appeals. In another decision, the Supreme Court yesterday side-stepped a major case involving the issue of whether public employees should be given preference in hiring or promotion on the basis of race or gender. The Court dismissed by an eight-to-one vote a challenge by two white prison guards in California to an affirmative action plan designed to speed the promotion and hiring of blacks and women. Although the Court had originally agreed to decide the case, it said yesterday that after thinking it over more hearings in a lower court were needed before the case should come before the nation’s highest Court. It is said there were still unresolved questions about how the affirmative action programme worked. Under the plan, supervisors were given a goal of

increasing minority (mostly black) employees to at least 70 per cent of the inmate population and the female work force to the same percentage of women in the general population. The goal was 36 per cent minority and 38 per cent women. The rationale offered was that the prison population was easier to control if there were more guards of the same race as the inmates. The State of California also said there were too few women employees.