CHARLOTTE - Bankruptcy Judge Laura Beyer ruled against asbestos lawyers who asked her to exclude 221 case files that Georgia Pacific entity Bestwall offered as evidence of fraud.
The lawyers had described the files as salacious.
Beyer denied their motion to exclude the files on Jan. 30 for reasons she stated at a hearing.
Bestwall claims the files will prove that plaintiffs inflated their recoveries by alleging one set of exposures in private trusts and another set of exposures in open court.
Bestwall distilled the files from a random sample of court cases it settled.
Georgia Pacific created Bestwall for the purpose of establishing a trust to resolve current and future asbestos liabilities.
Bestwall filed a reorganization petition at Charlotte in 2017 and moved for trial to estimate the amount a trust would require.
The plaintiff committee proposed to base the estimate on historic settlements.
Bestwall proposed to estimate the difference between settlement amounts and amounts Georgia Pacific would have paid if it had known of exposure claims in the trusts.
Bestwall sought access to trust claims and trusts resisted.
Through litigation and negotiation Bestwall obtained a random sample of claims.
In 2023, Bestwall selected 79 individual cases and aggregated 142 for group analysis.
The plaintiff committee moved to exclude the files last October.
Committee counsel Robert Cox of Charlotte claimed Bestwall skewed its presentation with statements from long ago and self serving data from trusts.
He claimed the average age of the settlements was 14 years.
He claimed it would take significant time to locate documents and much if not all the missing information could never be recovered.
He claimed neither lawyers nor judge would know what transpired orally.
He predicted a trial on each file.
Bestwall counsel Richard Worf opposed the motion in December.
“The evidence leaves no doubt that numerous exposures asserted in trust claims were not included in those suits and in many cases were expressly denied," he wrote.
He claimed this impacted Georgia Pacific’s settlements.
He claimed failure to disclose exposure evidence occurred across a wide array of plaintiff firms, time periods and jurisdictions.
Cox amended his motion to claim Bestwall had to establish elements of fraud in each case.
“The debtor intends to introduce salacious and defamatory allegations about alleged omissions against long dead claimants and their counsel who are unable to defend themselves," he wrote.
Worf responded in January that Bestwall didn’t have to prove fraud.
“To be sure, the facts of many of the non disclosure claims paint a picture of questionable conduct by plaintiffs and their counsel," he wrote.
He claimed some plaintiffs executed affidavits of exposures to trust products before or shortly after denying those exposures in tort cases.
“In still other cases plaintiffs executed affidavits attesting to dozens of alternative exposures to trust products that the debtor could have used to greatly reduce its risk of being found liable and the potential amount of any liability," he wrote.
Beyer denied the motion without prejudice.