The History Of Asbestos Settlements
Asbestos litigation has been continuing and intensifying in the U.S. for a generation, but two major companies seem poised to have made thousands of settlements in asbestos related cases. The two companies swamped by asbestos settlements are Halliburton, the oil-field services firm once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, and Honeywell, a diversified manufacturer. Together they have 200,000 workers and at least 500,000 theoretical asbestos claimants. While both companies appear close to settling the bulk of asbestos claims, the actual deals could still unravel in the future.
Halliburton acquired the asbestos settlement claims when it bought Dresser Industries, a subsidiary of which was involved in asbestos in 1998. The asbestos settlement claims have been pending in a bankruptcy court in Pittsburgh. The Honeywell asbestos settlement involves about 190,000 of 200,000 claimants in lawsuits related to its former North American Refractories unit, known as Narco. Halliburton's asbestos settlement of 300,000 claims is valued at close to $4 billion. It would spare the company from bankruptcy, the company and lawyers have said. Many of the companies have tried to avoid bankruptcy but have failed, due to the huge amounts of pending asbestos settlements. It is hard to settle asbestos related class action cases, since the claims come from many angles -workers who claim to be sick from asbestos exposure, who have been exposed but are not sick, who may or may not have been exposed at all. For that reason, critics of asbestos settlement lawsuits call them a legal plague of unprecedented proportions and a massive conspiracy to boot. The number of asbestos settlement claims is growing today. "Asbestos litigation today is, for the most part, a massively fraudulent enterprise that can rightfully take its place among the pantheon of such great American swindles as the Yazoo land frauds, Credit Mobilier and Teapot Dome," said Lester Brickman, a professor at Cardozo Law School, in a recent speech on asbestos settlements. Brickman says that few asbestos settlement claimants are actually sick and that most defendants are saddled with claims of workers from companies they acquired many years earlier. If the Halliburton and Honeywell asbestos settlements survive court challenge, they could spur further resolution in this tangled mass of litigation, made thornier still by a 1999 Supreme Court decision that set aside a $1.5 billion for asbestos settlement by plaintiffs' lawyers and Owens Corning, rejecting it as unfair to people who had been exposed to asbestos but were not yet sick. Halliburton said in a statement that this asbestos settlement provides for a trust funded by up to $2.8 billion in cash and 60 million shares of stock. These assets would be used to pay asbestos settlement claims from people injured or sickened by contact with asbestos. The arrangement is similar to that used by Johns-Manville, the dominant player in the asbestos industry when injury claims swamped it in the early 1980s. Researchers say that asbestos settlements for personal injury claims have cost more than $54 billion in so far. That is truly an amazing amount for asbestos settlements! |
