The outbreak in 2008 and 2009 was blamed for nine deaths and sickened hundreds more, and triggered one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history.
Meanwhile, back in WASHINGTON (NYT Story) — Saying that safety practices at General Motors were “broken,” federal regulators on Friday imposed the biggest punishment they could on the automaker and condemned it over its failure to promptly report a defect that G.M. has linked to 13 deaths.
G.M. will pay a $35 million penalty — the maximum allowed and the largest ever imposed on an automaker — and will be required to make wide-ranging changes to its safety practices that will be supervised by the government, another first for an automaker.
“What G.M. did was break the law,” Anthony Foxx, the secretary of transportation, said at a news conference.
In the GM case, it was revealed that certain executives were aware of the safety problem but chose to remain silent. Yet nobody will be criminally prosecuted. Nobody goes to jail.
