Criminality and Asbestos in Industry

Our plain-English summary of Criminality and Asbestos in Industry, by B. Castleman (New Solutions, 2017).

The study

• Author: B. Castleman
• Journal: New Solutions
• Published: 2017;26(4):557-580
• Cited by: 2 articles, as counted by NIH iCite
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

Abstract

Criminal prosecutions of individuals in the asbestos industry are reviewed, particularly the case of asbestos owner-executive Stephan Schmidheiny. Italian courts sentenced Schmidheiny to sixteen to eighteen years in jail for creating an environmental disaster causing three thousand deaths. The convictions were overturned on a technicality, and a murder case against Schmidheiny has started. His firm, Eternit, made asbestos-cement building products in many countries. Schmidheiny directed a cover-up that the Italian Court of Appeal blamed for delaying the ban of asbestos in Italy by ten years. Today, the asbestos industry is a criminal industry, profiting only by minimizing its costs for the prevention and compensation of occupational and environmental illness. The asbestos industry should only be consulted by governments for the purpose of closing it and dealing with the legacy of in-place asbestos.

In plain English

This article is a commentary, not a research study. The author, who testified in the Italian trial, reviewed criminal prosecutions of people in the asbestos industry, mainly Stephan Schmidheiny, owner-executive of the Eternit asbestos-cement company. In the United States, executives of W. R. Grace & Co. who were charged over asbestos pollution of Libby, Montana, were acquitted. In Italy, a Turin court in 2012 sentenced Schmidheiny and a Belgian co-defendant to sixteen years each for willful disaster. Prosecutors said about three thousand people had died. The appeal court raised Schmidheiny's sentence to eighteen years and found that his cover-up delayed Italy's asbestos ban by ten years. In 2014 the Court of Cassation dismissed the convictions under the statute of limitations. In 2016 a court allowed a separate murder case involving 258 people to proceed. The author concluded that the asbestos industry is a criminal industry and that governments should deal with it only to ban new asbestos use and to manage asbestos already in place.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: Commentary (journal 'Comment and Controversy' section) reviewing criminal prosecutions in the asbestos industry, drawing on court records, corporate documents, media reports and the author's own experience as a witness in the Italian trial
• Who was studied: Criminal cases against asbestos-industry individuals, mainly the Italian case in Turin against Stephan Schmidheiny (Swiss Eternit) and Baron Louis de Cartier de Marchienne (Belgian Eternit). That trial ran from December 2009 to late 2011, with appeals through 2014 and a later murder case. The article also covers United States cases, including W. R. Grace executives over Libby, Montana. The author testified in the Turin trial.
• Exposure: Asbestos from Eternit asbestos-cement plants, especially the plant in Casale Monferrato, Italy: dust inside the plant, crushed broken asbestos-cement pipes spread around the countryside, and dusty work clothes taken home. In the US case, asbestos contamination of vermiculite mined at Libby, Montana.
• Main results:
  • In February 2012 the Turin trial court sentenced each of the two defendants to sixteen years in jail for willful disaster
  • The prosecutors said about three thousand people had died as a result, and more were dying every year
  • The trial court awarded interim payments of 30,000 to 70,000 euros each to thousands of individuals. The total, about 100 million euros, was largely upheld by the appeal court in 2013, but the payments were not made.
  • The Court of Appeal increased Schmidheiny's sentence to eighteen years
  • The appeal court found that Schmidheiny directed a cover-up that delayed the ban of asbestos in Italy by ten years, and that he personally ordered a disinformation campaign from 1976 on
  • In November 2014 the Court of Cassation dismissed the convictions. The prosecutor at that court argued that prosecution for environmental disaster was barred by the statute of limitations, counted from the plant's closure in 1986.
  • On 21 July 2016 the Italian Constitutional Court ruled that a murder case against Schmidheiny involving 258 people could proceed to trial. The article earlier says prosecutor Guariniello named 256 victims.
  • In the United States, the jury acquitted all the W. R. Grace corporate executives charged over Libby, Montana
• The authors' conclusion: The author concluded that the asbestos industry is a criminal industry today. In the author's view, governments should interact with it only as needed to ban new asbestos use quickly and to protect against asbestos already in place, and the criminal code should be used to hold people personally responsible.

Topics

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Eternit, Asbestos-Cement, Appeal.

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