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deal. Therefore, had petitioner been independent, it might not
have been willing to accept the commission rate specified in the
SCP contract. According to Dr. Frisch, the commission paid to
petitioner was just one piece of the financial arrangement
between Dole and the Canelos group. He stated: "While the
arrangement as a whole was clearly arm's length, it is not
possible to tell directly whether any one piece of it, taken in
isolation, was something to which arm's-length parties would
agree."
Dr. Frisch disagreed with Dr. Cook's opinion that the Van
Dyke, Apache, or Bud Antle transactions were comparable to
petitioner's transactions with the otros growers. Dr. Frisch
stated that petitioner did not perform the same functions for Van
Dyke as it performed for the Canelos growers or for the otros
growers. In particular, the Van Dyke transactions did not
involve border-crossing activities, Van Dyke did its own
warehousing, and it arranged for the buyers to pick up the
produce from its facilities.
As for the Apache transactions, Dr. Frisch stated that those
transactions are not comparable to the SCP deal because the
market for "off-grade" tomatoes handled by Apache was
significantly different from the market for the high-quality
tomatoes distributed by petitioner. In the "off-grade" market,
the customers consist of buyers who are interested in a value
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