The Informant

Competitors are our friends. Customers are our enemy. The CEO of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) in the early nineties, Dwayne Andreas, held such interesting views. For acting on these views and indulging in price-fixing, the then vice-chairman of the company, Michael Andreas, and two other officials received prison terms.

Mark Whiteacre, the whistleblower, also received a prison sentence, but that was for stealing money from ADM while he was wearing an FBI wire-tap to record details of how ADM and its Japanese competitors fixed international prices for a product called lysine.

Kurt Eichenwald, a New York Times journalist, gives us a bullet-train of a read, describing how the FBI stumbled on the price-fixing situation at ADM and how they ran an international investigation to prove their case.

The book was released in 2000, but here’s the deal. It’s been made into a movie of the same name (Steven Soderbergh directs, Matt Damon plays Whiteacre) that releases mid-September. Do yourself a favour. Get hold of the book first. It has everything: Great characters, intrigue, an intricate international investigation; all held together with detailed research.

The Informant, Kurt Eichenwald Paperback, 656 pages, Broadway, August 2009, Rs 450