Frankfurt, Germany
German chemicals giant Bayer said Wednesday it would appeal against a US court decision to award damages to a plaintiff who blamed his cancer on the group’s Roundup weedkiller.
The state court in San Diego on Tuesday ordered Bayer’s Monsanto unit to pay damages totalling $332 million (315 million euros) to Michael Dennis, a former land surveyor who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after using the glyphosate-based herbicide for over 30 years.
“We cannot understand the verdict,” a Bayer spokesman told AFP, saying the ruling would be appealed.
“We are confident that this decision will be corrected through legal action and that the excessive amounts of damages, the size of which is unconstitutional, will be reduced.”
The latest US court loss is the third for Bayer over the past month, reversing a trend which had seen the group win a string of key cases.
The German group acquired Monsanto in 2018, a blockbuster $63-billion deal which quickly turned sour.
Bayer inherited Monsanto’s legal woes in relation to Roundup and has since faced a wave of lawsuits in the United States over claims it causes cancer — an accusation which Bayer contests.
Of the 160,000 cases brought against the group in relation to the weedkiller, 113,000 had been settled or dismissed, according to Bayer, which has put aside $16 billion to cover the legal risk.
© Agence France-Presse
