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According to the latest Bloomberg news, Johnson & Johnson's shares fell after a jury ordered the company to pay $ 4.69 billion to 22 women who claimed that the products of talc of the company contained asbestos.
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This verdict makes this case the 6th biggest legal battle of defective products in American history. The award ordered by the jury is $ 4.14 billion in damages and an additional $ 550 million to be paid to the 22 women and their families as compensation.
The verdict was rendered by the jurors of the St. Louis Municipal Court. After the news, J & J shares fell 0.7% to trade at $ 126.83 a share in the morning in New York. Despite the fact that there were no changes in the main market indices.
According to a Credit Suisse badyst, Vamil Divan, investors will focus more on these legal cases as they will be concerned about the long-term impact term of these great rewards for applicants. Overall, however, Divan believes that J & J is strong enough to absorb relatively large payments like these to solve these cases. Credit Suisse awarded J & J a rating of "outperformance"
. J & J spokesman Carol Goodrich said the company was going to appeal the decision. She claimed that the verdict was the result of a rather unfair process that had allowed 22 women to be represented in one case, most of whom had no connection with Missouri.
Goodrich also stated that the fact that the plaintiffs were awarded approximately $ 25 million, regardless of their personal facts, or the differences in the laws for each of the individual causes of women, which shows that there was an overwhelming prejudice against this kind of procedure.
also stated in his email statement that Johnson & Johnson 's products did not contain asbestos and certainly did not cause ovarian cancer. She said she was confident that this verdict would be overturned. Goodrich said that there were too many mistakes in this lawsuit, even worse than other cases the company had fought, whose verdicts had been overturned.
Johnson & Johnson was not the only company this group of 22 women pursued. They also sued a commercial division of Imerys SA, the company that supplied talc to J & J. However, Imerys Talc quietly settled the case on confidential terms well before the start of the lawsuit. The company has agreed to pay plaintiffs about $ 5 million to settle the claims, according to internal sources.
According to a Widener University professor who teaches collective crime cases, Jean Eggen, this case will make headlines. is the biggest verdict for a jury trial for this year. However, the decision regarding asbestos in J & J's baby powder in favor of women alleging that it causes ovarian cancer is going to have a much greater and long-term impact on l & # 39; company.
She said that this new theory has found buyers. According to the plaintiffs' lawyer, Mark Lanier, J & J knew that its products were tainted with irregularities and was doing everything in its power to ensure that this information was not disclosed. Public. He said that if a test showed that the J & J product contained asbestos, the company sent that product to another lab that it was controlling to produce conflicting results.
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