An AstraZeneca Plc affiliate that owns a contaminated former acid-factory site in Richmond, Calif., sought chapter 11 protection, Bloomberg news reported yesterday. Cherokee Simeon Venture I LLC, which uses AstraZeneca’s U.S. headquarters address in Wilmington, Del., cited about $50 million each in assets and debt in court papers filed on Monday. The waste site, along San Francisco Bay, was developed in 1897 by Stauffer Chemical Co., later Bayer CropScience Inc., to make sulfuric acid, and until the 1970s was also used to produce agricultural products including fertilizer, according to a 2005 maintenance plan submitted to the California Environmental Protection Agency.
