Fired ADM Executive Agrees to Guilty Plea : Agriculture: Accord on tax evasion, fraud requires him to continue coopera- ting with federal price- fixing probe, sources say.

DECATUR, Ill. â€”  Mark Whitacre, the fired senior executive of Archer Daniels Midland Co. who also worked as a government informant, has agreed to plead guilty to federal felony charges, according to sources close to the investigation.

The charges involve income tax evasion and defrauding the shareholders of the company, and relate to secret payments Whitacre received from the company in a Swiss bank account, the sources said.

The plea agreement, negotiated last month, requires Whitacre to continue cooperating with the government’s investigation. The agreement will not become final until prosecutors are satisfied with his assistance in their multifaceted investigation of the company and its executives.

Decatur-based Archer Daniels, the world’s largest processor of corn, soybeans and other agricultural products, is the focus of an inquiry into alleged price-fixing by the company and alleged tax evasion and fraud by company executives. It has denied doing anything wrong.

In recent weeks, Whitacre has been on job interviews with half a dozen companies, said a source close to him. He’s explained his plea agreement during those discussions.

Whitacre spent three years working undercover for the Justice Department in its investigation of alleged price-fixing by Archer Daniels. He was fired as president of the company’s BioProducts unit in August after Archer Daniels accused him of embezzling $9 million.

The company’s accusation came after it learned that Whitacre was an informant in the price-fixing investigation now being conducted by grand juries in Atlanta, San Francisco and Chicago.

Although he agreed to plead guilty to defrauding shareholders, Whitacre is adamant that he took funds only with the permission of his superiors, according to the person close to him.

Whitacre said that although he received payments on bogus invoices from Archer Daniels in a Swiss bank account, the secret payments were part of the compensation package he negotiated with the company, according to the source close to him.

Archer Daniels issued a statement Tuesday denying that the company made “any illegal off-the-books compensation.�

A federal grand jury in Washington is now investigating Whitacre’s allegations that as many as a dozen former or current executives at Archer Daniels received secret, untaxed compensation the same way he did, two people familiar with the inquiry said. Some of the payments went to overseas bank accounts and to companies tied to the officers, they said.

Whitacre said they were designed both to avoid shareholder scrutiny and income taxes, according to the source close to him.

Whitacre taped fellow Archer Daniels executives as part of the Justice Department investigation into suspected price-fixing by that company and other makers of high-fructose corn syrup, citric acid and lysine. Whitacre was seen by some executives as a possible future president of Archer Daniels before he was revealed in July to be the government’s principal informant in the probe.

No one has yet been charged with a crime in the inquiries.