3M to pay billions to settle US military earplug lawsuits – Bloomberg – RT World News
More than 300,000 soldiers claim to have suffered hearing loss and tinnitus due to a faulty company product.
US multinational conglomerate 3M has agreed to pay more than $5.5 billion to settle hundreds of thousands of lawsuits claiming it supplied faulty combat earplugs to the US military, Bloomberg told Bloomberg. people familiar with the matter.
Under the agreement, the company will pay out the money over a period of five years, the agency reported on Sunday. 3M’s board of directors has not yet approved the settlement, the statement added.
Asked about the matter by Bloomberg, a 3M representative said the company does not comment on rumors or speculation.
3M is facing more than 300,000 lawsuits from US troops, grouped in a multi-district lawsuit, claiming the earplugs the company’s subsidiary, Aearo Technologies, supplied to the military between 2003 and 2015 were flawed and failed to protect their users against hearing loss and tinnitus. .
Current and former service members claimed the company knew its earplugs were defective, but failed to notify the military of the problem and took no action to repair the product.
Earplugs, designed to protect troops’ hearing during training and combat, were standard equipment for US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
3M failed in 10 of the first 16 cap lawsuits and was asked to pay more than $250 million in damages to more than a dozen plaintiffs.
Bloomberg noted that the announced settlement would allow the company to avoid a much larger liability, estimated at $9.5 billion.
“It looks like 3M has negotiated a very good deal for itself, given that this litigation has hung over them for nearly a decade,” Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, told the agency.
3M previously filed for bankruptcy protection against Aearo Technologies in an attempt to protect itself from lawsuits over the earplugs. However, last June, a judge ruled that the company’s financial difficulties were not serious enough to open the procedure.
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That same month, 3M announced that it had reached a $10.3 billion settlement with a slew of U.S. public water systems to resolve water pollution claims related to the we call “chemicals forever” or the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) used in the company’s products.
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