Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Dole Food Inc., the world’s biggest fresh fruit and vegetables producer, can’t be forced in the U.S. to pay a $97 million verdict issued by a Nicaraguan court, a federal judge said.

The award, won four years ago by 150 Nicaraguans who claimed they suffered injuries from pesticides used at Dole’s banana plantations in the 1970s, can’t be enforced because it was based on a law that violates international legal standards, U.S. District Judge Paul Huck in Miami said in a ruling yesterday.

“The law under which this case was tried stripped defendants of their basic right in any adversarial proceeding to produce evidence in their favor and rebut the plaintiffs’ claims,” Huck said.

Dole argued at a four-day hearing before Huck that the 2001 Nicaraguan law is biased against defendants like itself. The statute was enacted to litigate injury claims by banana workers against foreign corporations and presumes the pesticide dibromochloropropane, or DBCP, causes sterility and other injuries.

Nicaraguan courts since 2002 have issued judgments in 32 such suits for a total of $2.05 billion against Dole and pesticide makers, Dole said in a May 8 regulatory filing. Dole said that if the plaintiffs had won in Miami, their lawyers would try in U.S. courts to collect the other judgments that the companies have refused to pay.

“This is a powerful ruling,” Theodore Boutrous Jr., a lawyer for Dole, said in a phone interview. “It will be a major deterrent to bringing other verdicts to the U.S.”

Steven Marks, a Miami-based lawyer for the Nicaraguan workers, didn’t return a call to his office yesterday.

Judicial System

Lawyers for the Nicaraguans had argued that the judicial system in Nicaragua has improved since 1995 when Dole and other defendants in pesticide cases successfully convinced a U.S. judge in Texas that the cases should be litigated in Nicaragua and other countries where the alleged injuries occurred.

The Miami case stems from a lawsuit brought in 2002 under Nicaraguan Special Law 364 against Dole, Dow Chemical Co., Occidental Petroleum Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc. Lawyers for the Nicaraguans brought the case to Florida in 2007 to enforce the verdict under a state law that recognizes foreign judgments.

Occidental, Shell

Huck ruled in January that Occidental and Shell couldn’t be held liable because there was no evidence their DBCP products were used in Nicaragua.

Dole, based in Westlake Village, California, convinced a Los Angeles judge this year that three class-action lawsuits by purported banana workers were based on a conspiracy hatched by U.S. and Nicaraguan plaintiff lawyers with the help of some judges in the Central American country.

The fruit grower, operating as Standard Fruit Co. in Central America, lost its Nicaraguan banana farms when the Sandinista government expropriated them after taking power in a 1979 revolution.

The case is Osorio v. Dole Food Co., 1:07-22693, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida (Miami.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Edvard Pettersson in Los Angeles at epettersson@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: October 21, 2009 00:01 EDT