The Informant! is a 2009 American biographal-comedy-crime film directed by Steven Soderbergh. It depicts Mark Whitacre's involvement as a whistle blower in the lysine price-fixing conspiracy of the mid-1990s as described in the 2000 nonfiction book The Informant, by journalist Kurt Eichenwald. The script was written by Scott Z. Burns, and the film stars Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, Joel McHale and Melanie Lynskey. Mark Whitacre, a rising star at Decatur, Illinois based Archer Daniels Midland in the early 1990s, blows the whistle on the company’s price-fixing tactics at the urging of his... wife Ginger. One night in November 1992, Whitacre confesses to FBI special agent Brian Shepard that ADM executives — including Whitacre himself — had routinely met with competitors to fix the price of lysine, an additive used in the commercial livestock industry. Whitacre secretly gathers hundreds of hours of video and audio over several years to present to the FBI.
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