Dow Chemical agrees to pay $835m to settle price-fixing case

Dow, which is in the process of merging with Dupont, said on Friday it chose to settle, without admitting any wrongdoing, because of “growing political uncertainties due to recent events within the Supreme Court”.

After Sandoval’s announcement Thursday, Reid’s office said they had no additional comment.

Senate Republicans have said they will not consider a nominee from President Barack Obama during an election year. We’ve put the probabilities together into a tool that lets you combine justices however you want: You can calculate the probability of the court losing two liberal justices, of the court losing another conservative justice, or of the court losing Justice Kennedy (however you label him). A federal court in Denver tripled the amount to $1.2 billion in accordance with antitrust laws, before ultimately lowering it to $1.06 billion. Other defendants in the case settled with the plaintiffs but the case against Dow went to a jury trial. “We thought it best for the company and the stakeholders to settle this and move on”.

Dow appealed the liability finding and award to a federal appeals court in Denver, which rejected its challenges to urethane purchasers’ class-action claims in September 2014.

The settlement is conditioned on the U.S. Supreme Court agreeing to hold Dow’s petition for a writ of certiorari in abeyance and the subsequent approval of the class settlement by the U.S. District Court of Kansas.

Dow disputes that it was part of a price-fixing conspiracy even though it agreed to resolve the case.

A spokeswoman for Sandoval said in a statement Wednesday that the governor had not been “contacted by or talked to the Obama Administration regarding any potential vetting for the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court”.

The jury award “was fundamentally flawed as a matter of class-action law”, the company said in its statement.

-With assistance from Margaret Cronin Fisk, Andrew Harris, Mike Dorning and Jack Kaskey. With a total market value of more than $106 billion, according to Bloomberg, it is the largest merger in the industry’s history.