The decision, released in London, represented a legal victory for a British investment fund, the Porton Group, and its partners, who filed a lawsuit in 2008 claiming that 3M had breached its contract to commercialize the test.
“I am delighted that we have been vindicated,” the fund’s chief executive, Harvey Boulter, said in a statement.
But the damage award was far smaller than the $40 million initially sought, and a convoluted legal morass surrounding the case is likely to continue.
On Monday, 3M also claimed victory and said it would press ahead with a separate lawsuit filed in the United States, which charged that Mr. Boulter and a well-known Washington lobbyist, Lanny J. Davis, had conspired to blackmail 3M; both men have denied the charges.
It was in 2005 that the Porton Group acquired an interest in the diagnostic test, which was based on technology developed by the British Ministry of Defense.
The test, known as BacLite, was said to offer a faster way to identify hospital patients who were carriers of the bacterium methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MSRA. In recent years, MRSA infections, which are resistant to antibiotics, have caused patient deaths and injuries.
In 2007, 3M struck a multimillion-dollar deal to acquire the test, though the majority of that payout was tied to future BacLite sales. Just a year later, however, 3M dropped BacLite, saying that its subsequent studies found a high rate of false results. By then, several competing MRSA tests had also been introduced.
As the Porton Group’s lawsuit against 3M slowly played out in London, the run-of-the-mill commercial dispute escalated in a trans-Atlantic legal death match with political overtones.
In its lawsuit, 3M charged that Mr. Boulter had tried to blackmail the company into settling the case for $30 million by threatening to use his ties to a top British government official to derail plans to confer a knighthood on 3M’s chief executive, George W. Buckley. Mr. Boulter rejected the assertion and Mr. Buckley has received his knighthood.
Meanwhile, the British government official at issue, former defense minister Liam Fox, abruptly resigned his position in October after it was disclosed that a closes friend had accompanied Mr. Fox on official trips and represented himself as someone who could broker access to the British government.
In the ruling released Monday, London High Court Justice Nicholas Hamblen rejected 3M’s claim that it had stopped developing BacLite because of fears that it could not win regulatory approval, finding instead that the company did so for commercial reasons.
Nonetheless, the judge noted that some hospitals that were using BacLite were also abandoning it around the time that 3M did because the test was slow and had other technical problems.
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