Manager of Research Services Verus LLC klavin@verusllc.com 609-466-0427 Progress of Roundup Settlement in Question Judge Would Likely Not Have Agreed to a Stay Had He Known About the Contingency On August 27, plaintiffs’ counsel in the multi-district litigation involving Monsanto and its widely used weed killer Roundup, advised the court that parent company Bayer AG appeared to be going back on the settlement agreement announced in June. At that time, the company had agreed to settle about 75% of the 125,000 claims filed by plaintiffs alleging that their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was linked to Roundup use; the settlement was for an estimated $10 billion. At the hearing, Judge Vince Chhabria advised that he had received confidential letters from a number of plaintiffs’ counsel with cases pending in the MDL who were concerned that Bayer AG was going back on the settlement, noting that the company had terminated settlement term sheets and refused to execute master service agreements that would finalize their settlements; Bayer conceded that there were currently no final agreements. Bayer did advise Judge Chhabria that about 667 of the cases currently pending in the MDL had been resolved, a figure that the judge noted was only a fraction of the 4,000 currently filed.  The judge also pointed to Bayer’s June 24 announcement of the settlement, [...]