La filiale du géant allemand Bayer, le groupe Monsanto, a été condamnée lundi aux États-Unis à payer 857 millions de dollars de dédommagements à des élèves et parents bénévoles d'une école qui ont été exposés à des PCB (polychlorobiphényles), des polluants considérés comme "éternels".
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NewsTranscript
00:00 The subsidiary of the German giant Bayer, the group MESANTO, was convicted on Monday in the United States of paying $ 857 million in damages to students and volunteers from a school that had been exposed to PCBs, polychlorobiphenyls, pollutants considered as eternal.
00:14 In a reaction to the AFP, MESANTO indicated its willingness to appeal this decision, as it had done in other cases related to the same school, the Sky Valley Education Center in Monroe, in the state of Washington, NW.
00:29 Five former students and two former student parents had taken a court case in King County, a jurisdiction that includes Seattle, claiming that their exposure to PCBs contained in the lighting had caused them health problems.
00:40 Several decisions have already been made concerning other teachers, students and parents of this same school, with several hundred million dollars in indemnity at stake.
00:50 MESANTO has repeatedly reiterated having stopped the production of these PCBs, intended to prevent the risk of fire since 1977, or before their ban by the US government in 1979.
01:03 The group never warned anyone that the PCBs would last longer than the facilities in which they were installed, said Felix Luna, lawyer of the seven plaintiffs, during his plea to the trial.
01:16 They never warned that when they enter the body, they stay there for life, that they are neurotoxic, a danger, he continued, according to the transcript of the debates.
01:25 During the trial, MESANTO highlighted the fact that the authorities of the school had been regularly alerted, as early as the 1990s, to the need to replace the lighting.
01:36 The agrochemistry group is facing other actions in justice related to the effects of PCBs.
01:42 In the reaction transmitted to the AFP, MESANTO recalled having already been put out of question in several files.
01:47 The Roundup was also targeted.
01:50 Bought back in 2018 by Bayer, averaging $63 billion, the company has also been convicted several times of indemnifying people who have been in contact with the controversial Roundup weed, based on glyphosate.
02:03 In mid-November, the jury of a Missouri court, the center of the United States, inflicted $1.5 billion in damages to the interests of three Americans who had imputed their non-Hodgkinian lymphoma years after the Roundup was used.
02:16 The group has also appealed for this conviction.
02:19 According to Bayer, 113,000 of the some 165,000 procedures initiated against MESANTO and related to weed have been resolved or declared unacceptable to date.
02:29 In June 2020, the pharmaceutical and biotechnology giant concluded a friendly agreement, according to the company, about 75% of the 125,000 actions then underway.
02:39 The transaction was to be paid a total amount of between $10.1 and $10.9 billion.
02:45 Bayer had also allocated $400 million to the compensation of people exposed to another herbicide, the Dicamba, and $820 million for PCB-related damages.
02:56 In 2021, the company allocated an additional $4.5 billion to the management of these procedures, bringing the total envelope to more than $16 billion.
03:05 Bayer disputes the harmfulness of glyphosate.
03:08 It was classified, in 2015, as "cancerous" by the International Research Center on Cancer of the World Health Organization (WHO).
03:18 On its part, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has indicated that it has not identified critical concerns in humans, animals and in the environment to prevent the authorization of herbicide, while recognizing a lack of data.
03:32 a manque de données.