April 22 (Bloomberg) -- Dole Food Co., the world’s largest fresh-fruit and vegetables producer, told a California judge that lawsuits by purported Nicaraguan banana-farm workers who claim they became sterile from pesticides are fraudulent.

Lawyers in Nicaragua recruited poor people who had never worked on a banana farm to file complaints, took them on field trips to farms, trained them to lie convincingly and faked lab tests and employment records, Dole’s lawyer Scott Edelman said yesterday at a hearing in state court in Los Angeles.

“It’s outrageous, and it’s an affront to our system of justice,” Edelman said.

Judge Victoria Chaney ordered the three-day hearing to determine whether two consolidated lawsuits by Nicaraguan workers should be thrown out because of “egregious misconduct.” After the first U.S. trial over the use of the pesticide in 2007, also before Chaney, evidence emerged of witness-intimidation and obstruction of justice, the judge said.

At least 16,000 Latin American workers sued in the U.S. in the past two decades seeking damages from chemical companies that made the pesticide dibromochloropropane and growers that used it in the 1970s. Nicaraguan courts have entered more than $2 billion in verdicts against Dole and other U.S. companies that plaintiffs’ lawyers are seeking to have enforced in U.S. courts.

“We are shocked and saddened at the allegations against third parties in this case, including our former co-counsel,” Michael Axline, a lawyer who represents the Nicaraguan plaintiffs, said at the hearing.

Plaintiffs’ Lawyers

Axline declined to comment further outside the courtroom. Juan J. Dominguez, the former co-counsel who Dole says recruited the Nicaraguans and told them to lie about having worked on banana farms, didn’t immediately return a call to his Los Angeles office yesterday.

Most of the employment records of Dole workers in Nicaragua were destroyed in the aftermath of the Sandinista revolution, opening the door to the fraudulent claims, Edelman said at the hearing.

Nicaraguan witnesses for Dole whose faces were hidden and whose voices were distorted to prevent identification, said in videotaped statements shown in court that they feared retribution if it became known they provided information to company investigators.

“They even would set fire to my house, even with my family in there,” one witness said. “These people don’t care.”

The 2007 trial led to a verdict for six of the 12 plaintiffs. That trial and the next two scheduled were meant as bellwether cases to provide guidance for future settlements, Chaney said. More than 40 cases with thousands of plaintiffs from Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama, Honduras and the Ivory Coast are pending in Los Angeles.

The cases under review yesterday were Mejia v. Dole Food, BC340049, and Rivera v. Dole Food, BC379820, California Superior Court, Los Angeles County (Los Angeles).

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

Last Updated: April 22, 2009 00:01 EDT