SAN FRANCISCO (Legal Newsline) - The law firm Cohen Milstein is asking a federal judge to let advance a class action on behalf of shareholders of Bayer who felt misled by the company's response to Roundup mass litigation.
The firm filed a motion Oct. 28 asking San Francisco federal judge Richard Seeborg to certify a class and appoint it class counsel, five months after Seeborg threw out some of the plaintiffs' claims.
Lead plaintiffs Sheet Metal Workers' National Pension Fund and International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local No. 710 Pension Fund seek to be appointed class representatives, as does the International Union of Operating Engineers Pension Fund of Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware.
The case was spawned by thousands of lawsuits against Bayer and Monsanto that said the weedkiller Roundup's active ingredient glyphosate causes non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Seeborg's May decision took away arguments Bayer misled shareholders with its claims regarding its science-based arguments that it made when fighting personal injury lawsuits.
Seeborg’s earlier ruling that denied a first motion to dismiss relied on a 2002 internal Monsanto email in which its head of product safety strategy stated “Glyphosate is OK but the formulated product (and thus the surfactant) does the damage.”
The lawsuit alleges Bayer hid the true magnitude of its Roundup liability, which includes a $10 billion settlement of some 95,000 claims. At issue is a 38% drop in the value of Bayer shares between July and October 2020.
Bayer agreed to buy Monsanto in 2016 and closed the deal in 2018. Soon after completing the acquisition, juries returned more than $150 million in damages in two Roundup trials in California, which stimulated lawyers to file thousands of similar cases. Bayer offered to settle the litigation for $10.9 billion in June 2020. Its shares fell the following month, after U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria said it was unlikely he would approve the deal.
The plaintiffs immediately sued, claiming Bayer misled investors about lapses in its due diligence, failed to disclose the cancer risk of glyphosate and failed to properly account for its legal liability.