W R Grace Co

Despite an intensifying power struggle in Russia and worries about a possible return to communism there, a major U.S. chemical company Tuesday decided to go ahead with plans for a Russian joint venture. W. R. Grace & Co. said it would invest several million dollars in a factory to make vacuum-packed food containers and set up a sales division in Moscow. For Grace and most other companies, it has been easy to stick with plans for investment in Russia.

W.R. Grace and Co. and seven high-ranking employees knew a Montana mine was releasing cancer-causing asbestos into the air and tried to hide the danger to workers and townspeople, according to a federal indictment unsealed Monday. More than 1,200 people became ill, and some of them died, prosecutors said. The asbestos was naturally present in a vermiculite mine operated by Grace in the town of Libby for nearly 30 years.

Federal securities regulators, launching an opening volley in their declared war on corporate accounting fraud, on Tuesday accused chemical giant W.R. Grace & Co. of manipulating earnings during the early 1990s to meet Wall Street's expectations. The Securities and Exchange Commission also charged seven former Grace executives, including former Chief Executive J.P. Bolduc, with carrying out the alleged company fraud from 1991 to 1995.

W.R. Grace & Co. on Friday rebuffed Baxter International's $3.8-billion bid for its kidney dialysis subsidiary, saying Baxter had failed to participate "in an orderly sale process." Grace said it will announce plans Monday for its National Medical Care unit, the nation's largest kidney dialysis provider, with $1.9 billion in 1994 sales. Other bidders for the unit were expected to emerge, including Fresenius, a German maker of medical products.

Hoping to catapult itself into the big leagues of fast food, Del Taco Inc. announced Monday that it has recaptured exclusive rights to its name and has embarked on a major franchising push. In the process, it hopes to draw a bead on rival Taco Bell Inc. and become a nationwide chain, competing head to head with McDonald's and Burger King.

W.R. Grace & Co., a maker of chemicals and building materials, filed a bankruptcy reorganization plan that would limit its asbestos-related debts to $1.61 billion and leave shareholder interests mostly intact. The 150-year-old company filed for bankruptcy in April 2001 to cope with more than 325,000 asbestos-injury lawsuits. It submitted the recovery plan Saturday to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del.

Employees at the W.R. Grace & Co. industrial plant in Santa Ana from 1972 to 1993, and possibly nearby residents at the time, could face asbestos-related health problems and should seek medical attention even if they do not have symptoms, a federal official warned Thursday.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday let stand lower court rulings that require W.R. Grace & Co. to pay a $54.5-million federal bill for asbestos cleanup in a Montana mining town described by federal regulators as one of the nation's most contaminated Superfund sites. The court rejected Grace's appeal of a decision in favor of the Environmental Protection Agency, which sued Grace five years ago to recover the cleanup costs at a vermiculite mine in the town of Libby.

A federal jury on Friday acquitted W.R. Grace & Co. and three of its former officials of charges that they knowingly exposed residents of Libby, Mont., to asbestos poisoning associated with a mining operation and conspired to hide it. The verdict brings to an ignominious end one of the most significant criminal prosecutions the government had ever filed against a corporate polluter.

Zonolite Mountain was very good to Libby, or so it once seemed. It was also a killer. Now that the federal government has indicted seven mining executives on allegations of deliberately concealing that second part, this northwestern Montana town is full of people who are angry, shocked, sickened, betrayed. They just can't agree on why.