Posted on 12/09/2004 6:06:08 AM PST by OESY
Investors seem to be betting that Congress will fix the asbestos mess this coming year.... We suspect they're too optimistic, and for now we take more heart from last week's landmark decision by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to reject the $1.2 billion Combustion Engineering settlement.
...[O}ur view is that the judiciary is finally exercising some adult supervision over a mess of its own making. Combustion Engineering, a unit of European construction giant ABB, had become a model of how trial lawyers abuse "prepackaged" bankruptcies to rake in millions for their unimpaired clients, while leaving real cancer victims with the leftovers.
As a little background, "prepacks" are a popular way of navigating bankruptcy, allowing creditors to vote on a reorganization plan before a company even files for bankruptcy, thereby getting firms in and out of court quickly. Asbestos companies have been counting on prepacks to speed along settlements that have dragged on for decades....
Asbestos law firms team up and pool their plaintiffs, the vast majority of whom aren't sick. They exercise their clout by taking over the reorganization plan, designing it to hand the bulk of the money to their own clients. Their majority pool of plaintiffs (who each get a vote) then outvote everyone else in favor of their skewed plan....
Perhaps the ruling will even inspire some backbone among corporate asbestos defendants. Of late they've taken to giving the lawyers whatever protection money they want just to get the cases behind them....
It's now up to the lower court to produce a more just settlement. The key [is] evaluating the very legitimacy of the thousands of asbestos bogus claims already filed. This is one of the options Congress itself has been debating, namely a bill that sets out basic medical criteria for claimants....
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Tort Reform would bring so many jobs to America...
I work for ABB, always putting the screws to the litle guys is their claim to fame
Combustion Engineering was a boiler manufacturer and only fairly recently was bought by the conglomerant, ABB. Much of this asbestos stuff is decades old. Much of the old US code required asbestos insulation (eg. steam boilers on ships during WWII), but the companies have had no protection against massive lawsuits that resulted from industry wide ignorance of the dangers of asbestos.
The real sick people get little compensation, trial lawyers get rich and thousands of employees are out of work.
ABB bought CE and then tried to claim they didnt know anything about the asbestos suits or that they would have to pay any claims on them. We were put on wage and hiring freezes, and benefits cuts to help pay for the claims, as it damn near bankrupted ABB meanwhile some of the top brass who made the decision to buy CE took multi million dollar retirement packages
Asbestos would've saved some lives in the WTC towers.
Yo, we got fireproof lungs, or what? Also had a job at the old Bath Iron Works spraying asbestos cement on piping. How long have I got?
Your a tough cookie who can still freep. I'll give you till Hillary is elected :)
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