Story by Desmond Butler
Graphics by John Muyskens
Videos by Joy Sharon Yi and Erin Patrick O’Connor
Washington Post, June 29, 2021
It was a curious time for Sonny Perdue to close a real estate deal.
In February 2017, weeks after President Donald Trump selected him to be agriculture secretary, Perdue’s company bought a small grain plant in South Carolina from one of the biggest agricultural corporations in America.
Had anyone noticed, it would have prompted questions ahead of his confirmation, a period when most nominees lay low and avoid potential controversy. The former governor of Georgia did not disclose the deal — there was no legal requirement to do so.
An examination of public records by The Washington Post has found that the agricultural company, Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), sold the land at a small fraction of its estimated value just as it stood to benefit from a friendly secretary of agriculture.
Perdue did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the real estate deal. Jackie Anderson, a spokeswoman forChicago-based ADM, denied that the company sold the property at a discount, saying that ADM began negotiations with Perdue’s former company, AGrowStar, in 2015 — well before Trump was elected — and could not find another buyer.
“This was nothing more than a business decision to sell a significantly underperforming asset,” she said.
Danny Brown, the former president of AGrowStar, confirmed negotiations began in late2015. But Brown said ADM wanted $4 million for the plant — 16 times what Perdue’s company ultimately paid for it.
The timing of the sale just as Perdue was about to become the most powerful man in U.S. agriculture raises legal and ethics concerns, from the narrow question of whether the secretary followed federal financial disclosure requirements to whetherthe transaction could have been an attempt to influence an incoming government official, in violation of bribery statutes, ethics lawyers say.
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