8 Worst Corporate Scandals in Europe

6. Eternit Asbestos Scandal

We now know how carcinogenic the asbestos is, but people knew that since as early as the seventies. The seventies and the eighties are exactly the periods during which some 3,000 workers of Italian Eternit factories contracted and died of asbestos-related diseases. This is why Swiss billionaire Stephan Schmidheiny, who was Eternit’s founder and his Belgian partner Baron Jean-Louis de Cartier, were sentenced to 18 and 16 years in prison respectively, back in 2012. Latter of the two died in 2013, but Schmidheiny is still alive and free, fined only €90 million in total. That’s because Italian court overruled the prison sentence in 2014 and let industrial magnate walk. To make things even more ironic, Schmidheiny is also a founder and current honorary president of WBCSD – World Business Council for Sustainable Development. This green-oriented association of some 200 of world’s largest companies has been built on shaky foundations, it would seem, and it will be as murky as the Italian judicial system for as long as Schmidheiny is its honorary president.

Worst Corporate Scandals in Europe

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