(Bloomberg) -- Two shareholder proxy services recommended that investors vote in support of Bayer AG’s management and supervisory boards at this month’s annual shareholder meeting, even though the company’s shares recently fell to their lowest level since 2005.

The recommendations from Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. and Glass Lewis offer a boost to Chief Executive Officer Bill Anderson, who’s preparing to oversee his first shareholder gathering at Bayer, an event that often grows heated. The stock is down more than 50% since last April.

Since taking over as CEO in June, Anderson has focused on cutting out layers of bureaucracy and speeding up decision making at the German company. For now, the Texas native has ruled out splitting up the conglomerate, which includes units focused on agriculture, pharmaceuticals and consumer health. Instead, he’s vowed to fix four “broken areas,” which include thousands of lawsuits claiming that Bayer’s blockbuster weedkiller Roundup causes cancer.

Bayer shares were little changed in early Frankfurt trading, dropping less than 1% to €27.16.

High Debt

Both proxy services concluded that there’s no evidence that Bayer’s two oversight boards failed to fulfill their duties last year. What’s more, ISS pointed out that six of the seven members of Anderson’s management team weren’t in their current roles when Bayer spent $63 billion in 2018 for Monsanto. The deal saddled the company with high debt levels and billions of dollars in legal costs.

Bayer shares have cratered more than 70% since the Monsanto purchase. As Anderson looks to fix Bayer’s problems, he’s considering a controversial legal maneuver known as a Texas Two-Step bankruptcy to try to resolve the Roundup litigation in the US, Bloomberg reported last month. Bayer insists the weedkiller is safe.

The annual shareholder meeting will be held April 26.

The stakes have only grown for Anderson in recent months after more Roundup trial losses — along with some victories — and the surprising failure of antithrombotic medicine asundexian, which had been Bayer’s most promising experimental therapy, in a key late-stage trial in November.

Technically, shareholders could still vote against Anderson’s predecessor, Werner Baumann, who retired last spring, over the management team’s performance last year, ISS noted. But there’s no evidence that Baumann failed to fulfill his duties and shareholders already rebuked him in 2019 over the Monsanto deal, ISS said.

(Updates with shares in fourth paragraph)

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