German investors seek 2.2 bn euros from Bayer over Monsanto

Investors are seeking 2.2 billion euros ($2.5 billion) in damages in German court from chemical giant Bayer for losses incurred following its troubled takeover of the US firm Monsanto, their lawyers said Tuesday.

The investors accuse Bayer of having “misled capital markets about the economic risks from pending consumer lawsuits in the United States in connection with glyphosate and the herbicide Roundup” produced by Monsanto, law firm Tilp said in a statement.

Tilp said around 320 investors have submitted complaints, most of them institutional investors such as banks, wealth managers, insurers and pension funds.

The district court in Cologne must now decide whether “model case proceedings” requested by the lawyers allowing the claims to be grouped together can go ahead.

The Tilp law firm said it expected the court to open the class-action style proceedings “in the coming months”, and hoped the case would go to trial in 2022.

Bayer denies all wrongdoing, saying in a statement that it had “followed the law and fulfilled its disclosure obligations”.

Bayer has been plagued by legal woes since it bought Monsanto in 2018, with a flood of cases in US courts by cancer patients who say the glyphosate chemical in the Roundup weedkiller caused them to fall ill. Bayer rejects the accusations.

The difficulties contributed to the decline in Bayer’s share price, which has lost around half of its value since 2018, causing heavy loses to stockholders, according to Tilp.

fcz-sea/mfp/lth