Scotts Miracle-Gro, guilty of federal pesticide crimes in 2012, gives $250K to the super PAC backing Ramaswamy

The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, the Marysville-based lawn-and-garden giant, has given $250,000 to the super PAC working to elect Vivek Ramaswamy governor of Ohio — a rare direct corporate contribution from a company that once pleaded guilty to federal environmental crimes.

The contribution appears in federal campaign finance filings for V-PAC: Victors Not Victims, the independent super PAC formed by Ramaswamy’s allies to support his campaign. Records show Scotts made the $250,000 payment on Jan. 30 and designated it as a corporate contribution. Because V-PAC is an independent-expenditure committee rather than a candidate’s campaign, federal law lets it accept unlimited sums directly from corporate treasuries — something candidates themselves cannot do.

In a statement, Scotts Chief Communications Officer Tom Matthews did not dispute the contribution and said the company gives across the political spectrum. “When it comes to political contributions, we have a history of donating to Democratic and Republican organizations and committees,” he said, adding that the company’s corporate spending is guided by “a commitment to supporting a stable, predictable and science-based regulatory environment.” Matthews cited the company’s Marysville headquarters and Ohio workforce, saying its “commitment to Ohio runs deep.”

Scotts is not an ordinary corporate donor. In 2012, the company was sentenced in federal court in Columbus to a $4 million fine for eleven criminal violations of federal pesticide law — then the largest criminal penalty ever imposed under that law. A separate civil settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency brought the total to $12.5 million.

The company had pleaded guilty to treating its wild bird food with two insecticides that regulators had prohibited for that use, including one whose label warned it was “extremely toxic to fish and toxic to birds and other wildlife.” According to the Justice Department, Scotts kept selling the treated bird food for two years after the product line launched — and for six months after its own employees warned management of the danger. More than 70 million units had been sold by the time the company recalled the products in 2008. Scotts also admitted falsifying documents to convince the EPA and state regulators that unregistered pesticides had been approved.

The case is more than a decade old, and Scotts resolved it in full. The company attributed the falsified paperwork to a product manager, who pleaded guilty separately, and part of the sentence steered $500,000 to Ohio bird-conservation efforts, including the state Audubon society’s important bird area program and a Columbus Metro Parks habitat project. Matthews said the decades-old case had no bearing on the donation. “In no way did a compliance issue that occurred nearly 15 years ago and has long been resolved influence our decision making here,” he said.

Matthews’s statement described the company’s practice of making corporate contributions to “state-level political organizations and committees that represent the broader business community and the consumer lawn and garden sector.” V-PAC is a federal committee organized to elect a single candidate, and the statement did not separately explain the company’s decision to support it.

The donation gives a company with a federal environmental conviction a financial stake in Ohio’s next governor. Whoever wins in November will appoint the director of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency — a cabinet post that oversees the state’s air, water and waste enforcement — and will set the administration’s environmental priorities. Scotts is one of Ohio’s larger manufacturers, with its headquarters and research operations in Union County.

V-PAC has become the financial engine behind Ramaswamy’s bid, raising tens of millions of dollars, most of it from a small group of wealthy contributors led by Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass, who has given $20 million. The committee reported roughly $23 million in cash on hand this spring. Ramaswamy, a Republican, faces Democrat Amy Acton, the former state health director, in the Nov. 3 general election to succeed term-limited Gov. Mike DeWine.