khaldoun baghdadi

By Carey Gillam

Besieged by thousands of lawsuits alleging that its paraquat weedkiller causes Parkinson’s disease, Syngenta has entered into an agreement aimed at settling large swaths of those claims.

The company and lead counsel for thousands of plaintiffs have “entered into a signed Letter Agreement intended to resolve” the litigation, an April 14 court filing states.

The lawyers for the plaintiffs confirmed the settlement but declined to answer questions about the details.

“Public details of the settlement will be available for counsel and their clients once the process is finalized,” a team of plaintiffs’ lawyers said in a statement.

In a court hearing Tuesday, one of the lead plaintiff lawyers, Khaldoun Baghdadi, said the terms of the settlement should be completed within 30 days. He said further trial planning proceedings should be delayed.

Syngenta confirmed that it has “settled certain claims” related to paraquat, but said in a statement that it continues to believe that there is “no merit” to the claims.

Litigation “can be distracting and costly,” the company said. “Entering into the agreement in no way implies that paraquat causes Parkinson’s Disease or that Syngenta has done anything wrong. We stand by the safety of Paraquat. Despite decades of investigation and more than 1,200 epidemiological and laboratory studies of paraquat, no scientist or doctor has ever concluded in a peer-reviewed scientific analysis that paraquat causes Parkinson’s disease. This view is endorsed in science-based reviews by regulatory authorities, such as in the US, Australia and Japan.”