Bayer Chairman Quits Prior To Roundup Settlement Talks

Bayer Chairman Quits Prior To Roundup Settlement Talks

Introduction

On Wednesday, Bayer Chairman Werner Wenning notified that he is about to step down from his designation in April. He played a prominent role in the $63 billion deal of taking over Monsanto, which has resulted in the company fighting costly lawsuits.

Wenning became CEO in 2002 when the company was facing a crisis. During his stint as CEO, he clinched major takeovers. He stepped down from the CEO role after eight years by appointing a company outsider Marijn Dekkers in 2010 and became chairman two years later.

Bayer's share prices are going down rigorously since August 2018 when the company lost the first lawsuit claiming the weedkiller Roundup causes cancer. 73-year-old Wenning said that the company is progressing effectively in terms of legal proceedings of the lawsuits faced by it. Norbert Winkeljohann will succeed Wenning after the annual shareholders’ meeting on April 28. Norbert has been a member of Bayer’s supervisory board since 2018.

IARC, considered to be the apex in the field of cancer research, classified glyphosate as a “probable human carcinogen.” According to IARC, Roundup is made up of other ingredients that are toxic in themselves, and are also known to increase the toxicity of glyphosate. Monsanto has known this for many years but still refuses to study the link between cancer and Roundup.

Monsanto has a brief history of legal troubles and Glyphosate is just another herbicide of the company to attract lawsuits. Plaintiffs across the U.S. have filed numerous lawsuits. A plaintiff from one of the Roundup lawsuits claims that she worked as a grower’s assistant on a crop field in New York from 1994 to 1998 where Roundup was regularly sprayed indoors and outdoors resulting in chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 2012. She eventually quit the job and is currently seeking reasonable compensation and punitive damages in court.

According to the statistics, the number of plaintiffs doubled to 42,700 within three months in October 2019, and analysts predict that it will cost around $12 billion to the company. A groundskeeper in California was awarded $300 million in damages by a jury in the initial Roundup lawsuit, which later reduced to $78 billion. Amidst such speculations and allegations, Wenning decided to step down from his designation for the welfare of the company.