Late yesterday, the Northern District of Illinois handed a key victory to Mexican commercial truck part manufacturer, Sistemas Automotrices de Mexico S.A. de C.V. (SISAMEX), in a bet-the-company case involving allegations that a one of its joint venture partners, Meritor Heavy Vehicle Systems, thwarted SISAMEX’s right to be the exclusive manufacturer of Meritor products for sale to OEMs in Mexico. The court granted SISAMEX summary judgment, finding that starting as early as 2013, Meritor intentionally breached the parties’ agreement in an attempt to transition the manufacture of those products to Meritor’s facility in Mexico. The Court rejected Meritor’s vigorous attempts to rationalize its conduct, noting “no reasonable fact finder could credit Meritor’s position based on the evidence in the case.” “The Court’s well-reasoned decision wholly rejected Meritor’s arguments as (i) contrary to over a decades-worth of contemporaneous documentation, including Meritor’s myriad internal admissions, (ii) contradicted by the plain text of the parties’ agreements, and (iii) irreconcilable with the parties’ history of performance, as well the positions Meritor took throughout the litigation,” said Erik Haas, lead counsel to SISAMEX and a partner with Patterson Belknap in New York. “Indeed, Meritor offered no plausible explanation for advancing for the first time at summary judgment, arguments that it never raised before, while abandoning the positions it had maintained previously.” The case is Sistemas Automotrices de Mexico S.A. de C.V. v. Meritor Heavy Vehicle Systems, No. 14 C 5289.