Revamping of Manville Trust Is Proposed
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The trust set up by the Manville Corporation to compensate victims of asbestos poisoning, which is out of cash and will be unable to pay seriously ill people for decades, announced a plan yesterday for a quick settlement of tens of thousands of asbestos personal injury cases. Under the proposal, the Manville Corporation would provide an additional $520 million over seven years to the trust and lift restrictions on the trust’s ability to sell a $1.8 billion Manville bond. In addition, fees for plaintiffs’ lawyers, which had consumed tens of millions of dollars, would be cut to a maximum of 25 percent of what their clients recover. The proposal would give priority to the more seriously ill people — an estimated 23,000 who have cancer and other debilitating diseases — over those with less severe asbestos-related ailments, who would get nothing in the first year. Up to 37,500 of the less severely ill could receive a maximum of $2,000 in the second year of the plan. If, as expected, the plan is approved by a Federal District Court, it would remove tens of thousands of cases from hundreds of state and Federal courts around the nation and slash the legal fees that have taken most of its available funds. This would be accomplished by combining all the cases against the trust into a single class action. The Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust has become a symbol of the legal difficulties facing many former asbestos makers and their victims. Manville, for decades the nation’s leading producer of asbestos products, set the trust up two years ago to enable the company to rise out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. The corporation’s legal liability was shifted to the Washington-based trust, with the intention of making timely settlements of claims and helping victims avoid costly litigation. The trust is now facing more than 90,000 lawsuits in hundreds of state and Federal courts, legal bills of tens of millions of dollars, and decades-long delays in compensating asbestos victims, many of whom have fatal illnesses and cancers. By some estimates, more than two-thirds of the resources available for victims have been going to legal and administrative costs. The announcement of the new plan follows an order by District Judge Jack B. Weinstein of Brooklyn to revamp the ailing trust, which he has said was unfairly denying relief to tens of thousands of asbestos victims. The plan was worked out after months of negotiations among the Manville Corporation, the trust, a committee of seven lawyers representing thousands of victims and Leon Silverman, a New York lawyer appointed by the judge to deal with the trust’s problems. Experts said yesterday that the new plan marked a significant development in the law governing product liability and was likely to provide a new precedent for the handling of asbestos cases, which are now clogging many courts across the nation. ‘Legislated Disability Program’ “It sounds like a legislated disability program,” said Peter H. Schuck, a professor at the Yale Law School who has written a book about Agent Orange, one of the largest product liability cases and the role played by Judge Weinstein. “It will treat the cases more categorically and less individually and set priorities based on the severity of the illnesses.” More : query.nytimes.com |