Court rulings `vindicate` Bernie Banton

The fines handed to disgraced James Hardie executives are disappointing but
vindicate asbestos disease crusader Bernie Banton's legacy, his widow says.
Karen Banton says she's unhappy former chief executive Peter Macdonald was fined
just $350,000 for deceptive conduct over asbestos compensation which breached the
Corporations Act.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission had sought a fine in the NSW
Supreme Court of between $1.47 million and $1.81 million for Mr Macdonald.
Non-executive board members, including Meredith Hellicar and Telstra director Peter
Willcox, were fined as little as $30,000 on Thursday.
Mr Macdonald was also disqualified from managing a company for 15 years and the
others for between five and seven years.
Mrs Banton said she had mixed feelings about the punishment.
"Certainly their reputations are ruined for life," she said outside court.
"Really I feel for the barristers that were defending them, because how do you
defend the indefensible?
"No amount of money would have been adequate for their deceptions and misleading
behaviour."
Mrs Banton said her husband, who died in November 2007 from mesothelioma caused by
exposure to asbestos, would not have been satisfied with the penalties.
"But he would feel vindicated," she said.
"He had a very strong faith. If they haven't asked for forgiveness for their
actions, then that will be a definite day of reckoning for them, as it is for any of
us."
Mrs Banton said she would continue to fight for a solution to the "temporary
problem" of a shortfall in the compensation fund caused by the global financial
crisis.
"We want the company to remain viable and profitable because that is the only hope
for asbestos sufferers of the future to be compensated," she said.
Asbestos disease sufferer Mike O'Donnell said the fines brought little comfort to
victims.
"These guys come from the top end of the city. They're all well heeled. The fines
are peanuts. They won't be paying them anyway - they'll be paid by an insurance
company or James Hardie," he said.
"As far as the barring of these people to organise other operations, other
companies, they'll simply go away and put their money into something else and put
the wife and kids up front while (they're) over in the background pulling the
strings."
Australian Manufacturing Workers Union secretary Paul Bastian said the current James
Hardie board should learn from their predecessors' mistakes so they could understand
their legal and moral obligations to victims.
"What today's decision did was expose the extraordinary lengths James Hardie's
previous board went to, to avoid victims, to avoid paying the compensation," he
said.
"They did that because they saw them as no more than a line item on a balance sheet,
they didn't see them as real people.
"I think what the current board should do is have a dialogue with victims, they
should attend a bedside hearing of a sufferer who's about to die from mesothelioma,
so the next time they look at a line item they know that there's a real person
behind it, that there are real families behind it."
Asbestos Disease Foundation of Australia vice president Maree Stokes called for the
fines to be channelled into the victims' compensation fund and education programs.