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By Ludwig Burger and Brendan Pierson
(Reuters) -Bayer said on Friday it was again petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to sharply limit legal claims that its Roundup weedkiller causes cancer, seeking to avoid potentially billions of dollars in damages.
Bayer said in its petition that consumers should not be able to sue it under state law for failing to warn that Roundup increases cancer risk because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found no such risk and requires no such warning. In fact, it argued, federal law does not allow it to add any warning to the product beyond the EPA-approved label.
The company tried to make that case to the Supreme Court and was rebuffed in 2022, but a federal appeals court has since agreed with the company in a split from other appeals courts. The Supreme Court is generally more likely to take cases where federal appeals courts are divided.
A Supreme Court victory for Bayer would likely make it much more difficult for the lawsuits to continue, though it is not clear whether it would eliminate them entirely.
Friday's petition came in the case of John Durnell, who in 2023 won a $1.25-million verdict in a St. Louis, Missouri state court. Bayer has been hit with much larger verdicts over Roundup, most recently a $2.1-billion award last month to a plaintiff in Georgia.
The company has paid about $10 billion to settle claims that Roundup, based on the herbicide glyphosate, causes cancer. About 67,000 further cases are pending, for which the group has set aside $5.9 billion in legal provisions.
CEO Bill Anderson has struggled to revive a share price that has plunged by more than 70% since Bayer's $63-billion acquisition of Monsanto in 2018 that saddled it with costly litigation and debt.
The company's problems include the glyphosate litigation, a 2023 development setback for its most promising experimental medicine, weak agriculture markets and pressure from some investors to separate or sell businesses.Bayer plans to seek shareholder approval to raise equity capital worth close to 35% of its outstanding shares over the next three years to cover possible costs of U.S. litigation.
The company has warned U.S. lawmakers it could stop selling Roundup, which is widely used by U.S. farmers, unless they can strengthen legal protection against the litigation. It has already replaced glyphosate with other ingredients in the home consumer version of Roundup.
(Reporting by Ludwig Burger and Brendan PiersonEditing by Rod Nickel)
