“On Tuesday, 3M settled a suit filed by the state of Minnesota for $850 million, averting a much-awaited trial over the company’s responsibility for massive amounts of waste containing perfluorinated chemicals, which it had dumped in the state for more than 40 years…

With the settlement, 3M avoided any admission of liability. ‘We do not believe there is a PFC-related public health issue,’ said John Banovetz, senior vice president, 3M Research & Development, and chief technology officer, in the company’s statement. The statement also said that the ‘settlement will ensure that the money 3M contributes to the State will go directly to activities and projects related to the reduction of PFCs in the environment and also to the enhancement of groundwater sustainability in the Twin Cities East Metro area.’ The statement also described the settlement as ‘consistent with 3M’s long history of environmental stewardship.’

Critically, the settlement also allows 3M to largely escape a public airing of how it shielded itself from responsibility for PFOA contamination even though DuPont, which bought PFOA from 3M for years, was held liablefor causing kidney cancer and other diseases. That parallel litigation, which charged DuPont with polluting drinking water in West Virginia and Ohio with the very same chemical, resulted in a $671 million settlement last year. Documents obtained through discovery provided a close look at DuPont’s efforts to cover up its role in the contamination.

While some of 3M’s history will remain secret as a result of the settlement deal, documents already made public in the Minnesota case point to one critical tool the Minnesota-based company used to defend itself — a scientist named John Giesy, who helped 3M spin the science on PFCs chemicals in the company’s favor even as he presented himself as an independent scientist…

Giesy has worked as a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, Michigan State, and at least 11 other universities, and received grants from 3M for ‘selective funding of outside research.’ That funding was a key part of 3M’s strategy around PFCs, which according to one internal document was guided by the dictum ‘command the science.’ The studies the company produced through this effort, as slides 3M prepared about its research program make clear, were intended partly as ‘defensive barriers to litigation.’…

Giesy received more than $2 million in grants from 3M, according to his 262-page curriculum vitae, and has a net worth of about $20 million, according to the court filing. Although Giesy billed 3M for the time he spent reviewing articles (his rate for at least some of the work he did for the company appears to have been $275 per hour), he did not invoice the company for curating studies to limit its exposure. Instead, as he explained in a 2008 email to William Reagen, a lab manager at 3M, ‘In time sheets, I always listed these reviews as literature searches so that there was no paper trail to 3M.’

Giesy also appears to have been involved in a 3M-led effort to monitor research on PFCs in Asia.”

Read the full article by Sharon Lerner.