St. Louis Today (Post-Dispatch) reports that attorneys general from several states are expected to probe the pending Dow-DuPont and Bayer-Monsanto mergers.
Two groups of attorneys general are expected to look at the deal.
Carl Kanefsky, a spokesman for the Delaware Department of Justice, confirmed that the state would not be part of the legal actions and would have no further comment.
European regulators started the clock on consideration of the Dow-DuPont merger after a brief timeout. (See story below).
The Dow-DuPont merger calls for the combined agricultural businesses and two other collections of businesses to split off into publicly held companies.
Two of the three spin-offs, including the agriculture business, would be headquartered in Delaware.
Earlier, a Senate hearing regarding the Dow-DuPont merger was conducted by Iowa U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley. Iowa lost out as a headquarters site for the Dow-DuPont agricultural businesses. The Hawkeye state is the home to DuPont Pioneer.
There has also been concern that the wave of mergers will stifle competition and innovation.
Landing the two headquarters was considered a big victory for Delaware.
However, industry analysts have predicted that headquarters employment numbers would be small, with many of the administrative operations remaining in current locations.
Earlier this year, Delaware saw the loss of 1,700 high-paid jobs in research and development and other areas from cost cutting efforts by DuPont. The cuts were coming with or without the Dow merger under new CEO Edward Breen.
The wave of mergers came after rough conditions for seed and crop protection businesses in the past couple of years, with Brazil being especially hard hit.
Earlier, a government-owned company in China snapped Swiss-based seed company Syngenta.
The merger wave is likely to result in regulators ordering the sale of some businesses.
German chemical giant BASF is believed to be standing by to buy up some of those companies.
