Italy court sentences billionaire in landmark asbestos case

http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/asbestos/articles/entry/2186/

"Eternit and “The Bill Gates of Switzerland”
When ABREA was formed in 1995, it had about 470 members, mostly from the Eternit plant in Osasco. “At least 30 percent have died in the last 14 years,” says its president, de Souza. At least 10 have died of mesothelioma, a rare cancer that often starts in the pleura and is virtually always tied to asbestos exposure. The factory relied mainly on white asbestos, Giannasi says, though it also may have used “very small amounts” of blue into the mid-1960s. Industry representatives and some scientists maintain that blue and brown asbestos – no longer mined or used – are more lethal than white, a position disputed by many health experts.

Fuming about what they believe to have been gross corporate misconduct, de Souza and his fellow retirees are following a criminal trial in Turin, Italy, where two former shareholders in the Swiss Eternit Group — including onetime chairman Stephan Schmidheiny, a philanthropist dubbed “The Bill Gates of Switzerland” by Forbes magazine for his billion-dollar commitment to poor entrepreneurs in Latin America — stand accused of precipitating an environmental disaster. The charges stem from conditions at an Eternit asbestos cement factory in the Italian town of Casale Monferrato; some 2,000 people who worked in or lived near the plant have died of asbestos-related diseases. “Considering that hazardous exposures experienced in Italy were replicated elsewhere, there must be hundreds of thousands of people who have died from their exposures to this company's asbestos products,” says Laurie Kazan-Allen, coordinator of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat in London.

In an e-mail, spokesman Peter Schuermann wrote that Schmidheiny “cannot understand why he should be made responsible for the entire 80-year history of the Italian Eternit as one of the main defendants.” The Swiss Eternit Group was the biggest shareholder in the Italian plant for only its last 10 years, Schuermann wrote, and implemented “workplace safety measures which were in accordance with the highest standards.” According to Schuermann, the Swiss group sold its shares in the Osasco plant more than 25 years ago. He declined to comment on the ex-workers’ allegations but noted that “Stephan Schmidheiny himself worked as a trainee in the Brazilian Eternit under the same working conditions as the other employees.”

Fernanda Giannasi, second from left, and anti-asbestos activist Laurie Kazan-Allen, third from left, lead retired workers from the now-demolished Eternit asbestos cement plant in Osasco, Brazil, in a moment of silence for those who have died. (Credit: Felipe Lima)Giannasi has little sympathy for Schmidheiny, who claims on his own website that he was “dangerously exposed to asbestos fibers during my training period in Brazil.” Her disgust with the running of the Osasco plant motivated her to co-found ABREA. She continues to attend its monthly meetings, keeping the ailing members and their families apprised of developments in the asbestos wars. They seem to relish her stories: She’s held up asbestos shipments at ports and on highways and barged into businesses suspected of illegally selling asbestos products. She’s received death threats and been sued by the asbestos industry. For a time she was exiled to a tiny office at the Labor Ministry with no computer, no telephone and no responsibilities. She routinely defies her bosses, who view her as a headline-seeking provocateur; they’ve restricted her inspection activities to São Paulo state even though she is a federal official. “Every day is a problem,” Giannasi says.

The Brazilian asbestos industry has proved to be a fierce opponent. SAMA, which operates the Cana Brava mine in Goiás, and Eternit S.A., which operates four plants that make asbestos and non-asbestos roof sheets and other products, collectively gave more than 2 million reais (US$1.1 million) to federal, state, and local candidates from 2002 to 2008, records show. “They have many tentacles, like an octopus,” Giannasi says. Only four of Brazil’s 26 states, including São Paulo, have enacted asbestos bans. Asked about Giannasi’s campaign, a SAMA official addressed only the company’s own processes, saying fiber levels at the mine are “20 times lower than what the law requires” and that “workers have no physical contact with the mineral.”A spokeswoman for Eternit S.A., which has no connection to the Swiss Eternit Group, declined to comment."

The company in question.

Stephan Schmidheiny