Flamingo Industries (Usa) Ltd. And Arthur Wah v. United States Postal Service, an Entity Created Pursuant to the Postal Reorganization Act

Plaintiffs Flamingo Industries and its owner Arthur Wah (collectively “Flamingo”) brought suit in the Northern District of California against the United States Postal Service. Flamingo asserted a number of federal and state law claims stemming from the Postal Service’s termination of Flamingo’s contract to produce U.S. Mail sacks. The district court dismissed the suit for lack of jurisdiction and improper venue, and did not reach the merits of any of the claims. Flamingo appeals.

According to the allegations of Flamingo’s complaint, which we take as true for purposes of this appeal, the Postal Service terminated Flamingo’s contract because it wanted to use cheaper mail sacks manufactured in Mexico, sacks that fail to meet safety and quality regulations. To disguise this scheme, the Postal Service adopted outdated requirements for mail sacks that could not be met by the modern machines used by Flamingo and other domestic manufactures, creating a pretext for canceling the domestic mail sack contracts. Once those contracts were canceled, the Service declared a fake emér-gency in the supply of mail sacks that allowed it to award future contracts to foreign manufactures on a no-bid…