Bayer proposes paying USD 8 billions for Roundup cancer claims settling

Bayer is proposing to pay as much as USD 8 billion to settle more than 18,000 U.S. lawsuits alleging its Roundup herbicide causes cancer, according to people familiar with the negotiations, Bloomberg reports.

Bayer’s lawyers and attorneys for former Roundup users are in ongoing talks, based in New York City, aimed at hammering out an accord to resolve all current cases and any future cancer claims filed over the world’s top-selling weedkiller, people familiar with the discussions said.

Reports that a USD 6 billion to USD 8 billion settlement proposal has been discussed are “pure fiction,” said Kenneth Feinberg, a mediator called in by U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco, who’s overseeing cases consolidated in federal court.

“There have been absolutely no discussions to date of dollars or what the compensation would be for a global resolution” of the cases, Feinberg said in an interview Friday.

An agreement, which could take months to work out, would ease investor pressure over massive litigation exposure the German drug and chemical giant took on with its purchase of the weedkiller’s maker, Monsanto.

In August 2018, Monsanto was ordered to pay USD 289 million in damages in the first of thousands of U.S. lawsuits over alleged links between a weedkiller and cancer.