Bayer AG shares fell by 14% at the start of the week, following a San Francisco jury’s verdict that exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup caused Non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 46-year-old Dewayne Johnson while he worked as a groundskeeper.

The jury awarded $39.2m compensatory damages and $250m punitive damages for “failing to warn consumers that exposure to Roundup weed killer causes cancer”, reported Baum Hedland, one of Johnson’s three firms of attorneys.

Monsanto continues to operate independently from Bayer AG, but, following its acquisition of Monsanto on 7 June this year, Monsanto’s shares are no longer traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Actual integration was scheduled to begin about now, however, announcing the acquisition, Bayer stated that reasons which could delay integration included lower-than-expected revenues, customer loss and business disruption.

Baum Hedland says that Monsanto faces more than 4,000 similar cases across the United States.

Science will prevail

Speaking after the verdict, Monsanto vice-president Scott Partridge said that “Glyphosate does not cause cancer. The jury got it wrong. We will appeal the jury’s opinion.

“Glyphosate has a more than 40-year history of safe use. Over those four decades, researchers have conducted more than 800 scientific studies and reviews that prove glyphosate does not cause cancer.”

Johnson’s attorneys had put forward witnesses claiming that Monsanto employees “ghostwrote” scientific articles.

They also showed the court internal documents that tests conducted on Roundup were insufficient because Glyphosate, Roundup’s active ingredient was tested in isolation from its other ingredients.

Drawing similarities

Writing in The Guardian, Carey Gillam, director of US consumer group Right to Know said that Monsanto had drawn from the “playbook used by the tobacco industry in defending the safety of cigarettes – to suppress and manipulate scientific literature, harass journalists and scientists who did not parrot the company’s propaganda, and arm-twist and collude with regulators”.

Stephen Wilmot of the Wall Street Journal warned that Bayer is “saddled” with billions of dollars’ worth of liabilities but said that Monsanto’s guilt was much less than Volkswagen Group, whose shares have outridden its competitors’ since the 2015 emissions scandal.

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, Chris Perrella echoed Wilmot’s analysis that sizeable verdicts against Monsanto could affect Bayer’s bottom line.

The next case is due in court in St Louis in October, with further cases scheduled for 2019. However, Monsanto’s appeal would be heard by a judge, rather than a jury and therefore more likely to be swayed by science than emotion, Bloomberg reported.