Bayer, Germany’s biggest pharmaceuticals and biotech company, has been ordered to pay a record almost $2.1 billion (€1.94 billion) in punitive damages to a US cancer patient.
On March 24, a jury in the US State of Georgia ordered the company to pay $65 million (€60 million) and $2 billion (€1.85 billion) in damages to John Barnes.
He had sued Bayer subsidiary Monsanto in 2021, alleging that the company’s Roundup weedkiller had caused his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Punitive damages are court-ordered payments that exceed the actual damage incurred by the plaintiff and are meant to deter the defendant and others from engaging in unlawful conduct.
The Bayer penalty was one of the largest legal settlements in a Roundup-related case so far with the biggest compensation of $2.25 billion (€2.8 billion) awarded by a Philadelphia court earlier in 2025.
Roundup is a popular weedkiller sold by US agrochemicals company Monsanto. It contains the contentious chemical glyphosate, which has been accused of causing cancer.
Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018 for €56 billion. Since then, the German multinational has been hit with a spate of verdicts, primarily in the US, ordering it to pay damages amounting to several billions of Euros.
In 2018, Monsanto was accused of inadequately warning customers of the dangers of Roundup. A Californian jury found that the company knew its Roundup and RangerPro weedkillers were dangerous and failed to warn consumers, according to the BBC.
It was ordered to pay $289m (£226m) damages to a man who claimed herbicides containing glyphosate had caused his cancer.
Altogether, Bayer has already faced almost 180,000 lawsuits similar to the Barnes case and has set aside €16 billion for potential settlements.
The German company has announced it would appeal the Georgia sentence.
“We do not agree with the verdict of the jury,” the company wrote in a statement.
The decision did not align with scientific findings and the assessment of glyphosate by regulators around the world.
The European Union has concluded that glyphosate was not cancerogenic and allowed its use in member states at least until 2033.
Bayer also pointed out that, in the past, it had managed to reduce damages awarded by juries in similar cases by 90 per cent on average.
Bayer shares traded for €22 on March 24, only marginally above the 21-year-low of €19 they reached in autumn 2024.
In the six years since its acquisition of Monsanto, Bayer’s shares have lost almost 80 per cent of their value.
