86. Defendant Suppliers, and each of them have employed this marketing and labeling scheme to encourage users in the electronics industry to believe that Defendants' chemicals have been tested and proven to be safe for persons exposed to them in the environment of the "clean room." At all relevant times, Defendants, and each of them, have known that their chemical products were highly toxic and hazardous and would be used in "clean rooms" in conjunction with other chemicals also known to Defendants, and each of them, to be highly toxic and volatile. Defendants, and each of them, engaged in this scheme knowing that "clean room" air circulation systems were designed to remove particulates and actually re-circulate and re-distribute volatile toxic substances throughout the "clean room."

87. By claiming that their electronic grade products were purer than reagent grade chemicals, the Defendant Suppliers, and each of them, have engaged in a lucrative and deceptive practice of promoting and selling supposedly alleged "high purity" electronic grade chemicals to the electronics industry at exorbitant prices to an industry that wanted to believe that it was getting the best. These Defendants knew that its customers and their "clean room" employees would believe that alleged "high purity" meant both the highest level of quality and highest level of safety, when in truth any Defendant Suppliers' marketing and labeling scheme only meant extra expensive, but toxicologically indistinguishable from the toxicity of "laboratory" or "reagent" grade chemical products.

88. The Chemical Supplier Defendants have at all times had a financial interest in having their chemical products used by industrial workers even though such chemicals, either singly or in combination, jeopardize human health. The Chemical Supplier Defendants have known that their customers' employees, including IBM employees, would look to their employer as the logical and obvious conduit for all information needed to work safely, without danger to their health, and that information conveyed to their customers, including IBM, would in some fashion or form be repeated, communicated or conveyed to the customers' employees, including in the case of IBM as a customer, the instant plaintiffs and their decedent. By reason of their intimate involvement in the post-sale use and application of chemicals at their customers' premises, including such chemical use and application at IBM San Jose, Chemical Supplier Defendants have at all times had real exercisable opportunities and options to convey full, accurate and complete information to IBM employees, to insist upon the communication of full, accurate and complete information as a minimum threshold for their continuing

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COMPLAINT FOR DAMAGES, PERSONAL INJURY AND WRONGFUL DEATH

MM 006972