Asbestos Victims Compensation Fund (France, FIVA)
A French public fund created in 2000 that compensates asbestos victims and their families in full, without a lawsuit, then pursues responsible employers and their insurers.
Asbestos was banned in France in 1997, after decades of massive use in construction and industry. The diseases it causes, mesothelioma, lung cancers, asbestosis, appear twenty to forty years after exposure, and their number kept rising long after the ban. The 2001 Social Security Financing Act created the Asbestos Victims Compensation Fund to give victims a fast and complete route. Anyone suffering from an asbestos-related disease, whether exposed at work or in their environment, may apply. The fund makes an offer covering all heads of damage, on a scale it publishes, within deadlines set by law; the victim may accept or go to the court of appeal. The fund is financed mainly by the work accidents and occupational diseases branch of social security and by the state. Subrogated to the rights of the victims it compensates, it then brings recourse actions against employers, notably for inexcusable fault, and therefore against their insurers. For the market, the fund is the example of public pooling of a very long-tail serial risk that private insurance could not have carried alone within a reasonable time.
Textbook case: a former boilermaker develops mesothelioma thirty years after working in shipyards. The fund makes him an offer of full compensation within a few months, then sues his former employer for inexcusable fault to recover part of the sums paid.
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