After $1 Million Donation, Trump Dismisses Another Toyota Investigation
By Adam Zuckerman
Toyota just disclosed that President Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has dropped a years-long bribery investigation into Toyota Motor Thailand (TMT), a Toyota subsidiary.
The announcement, buried deep in Toyota’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, brings to an end an investigation into the company’s subsidiary effort to bribe a Thai judge, a violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law that prohibits companies from paying bribes to foreign public officials.
After a Thai court ruled that TMT owed $320 million for allegedly evading import taxes on Prius parts, TMT reportedly paid a middleman $18 million to bribe Thai Supreme Court justices to overturn the judgment. Toyota Motor Thailand’s president admitted to making the payment to Annanon, a small law firm whose revenues shot up from thousands to millions of dollars during the time of the alleged bribery scheme. The DOJ dropped the investigation just a week after announcing that, in an effort to make American corporations more competitive, it will ignore half of their criminal bribery schemes.
It is the latest of a series of actions the Trump administration has taken to benefit Toyota. It comes just a month after Trump’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) terminated a $60 million settlement that the agency had reached with Toyota’s financing arm for illegal lending practices. According to the CFPB, thousands of customers complained that Toyota dealers had lied to them, selling them expensive optional services that they claimed were mandatory. These service bundles averaged between $700 to $2,500 per loan. Toyota then made it nearly impossible for consumers to cancel those bundles, even sending them to a dead-end cancellation hotline designed to prevent them from cancelling.
The DOJ dismissal also came a month after the Trump administration and Senate Republicans, with lobbying support from Toyota, blocked California’s nation-leading vehicle emissions standards. It was a major victory for Toyota, which had been working since the first Trump administration to weaken California’s rules. In 2019, President Trump sought to revoke that right as part of an effort to roll back Obama-era rules. While Honda, Ford, Volkswagen, and BMW all sided with California, Toyota sued the state.
That victory was part of Toyota’s years-long effort to weaken climate policy. As I documented in January, amongst automakers Toyota has become the largest funder of climate deniers in Congress and the most ardent opponent of climate protections. It has helped to finance the campaigns of 207 climate-denying congressional candidates and has been ranked the third worst company in the world–after Chevron and Exxon–for its anti-climate lobbying.
The Trump administration’s actions are part of a larger trend of the administration doing the bidding of big corporations. Since January, it has halted, dropped, or withdrawn enforcement actions against more than 140 corporations. While not all of them are donors, many are. Toyota gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.
Trump carrying water for Toyota benefits the automaker, at least in the short term. But what does it mean for Thai citizens who will never see justice in a U.S. court? What does it mean for the thousands of customers in the U.S. that Toyota preyed upon and who now will never see their settlement? What will repealing the California waiver mean for the heat waves we are facing and for the 150 million Americans who are already exposed to unhealthy levels of pollutants?
When Toyota and Trump win, we all lose.