Asbestos in a Marseille theater: firm prison required against a former director of heritage

A year in prison was required Wednesday in Marseille against a former director of the city's buildings for not having transmitted an asbestos diagnosis in time, contributing to the exposure of the employees of the La Criée theater to this toxic substance. Robert Martin, 73, former territorial director of the southern buildings of Marseille, a sector on which La Criée depends, was tried since Tuesday for homicides and involuntary injuries, endangering the lives of others but also forgery and use of forgery.

He is accused of having transmitted two years late to the management of the theater, operator of the building owned by the city of Marseille, a technical diagnosis of November 2006 having nevertheless revealed the presence of asbestos, a highly toxic substance. Facts he disputes.

"If today Robert Martin is here, it is because people, workers, theater employees for decades have learned a few months apart that they had been unduly exposed for several years to asbestos , without their knowledge, (...) and that they developed pathologies characteristic of this exposure, even though people had the power, the knowledge and the means to act", developed the public prosecutor, Marion Chabot.

Two former theater employees, a maintenance worker and an administrator, died, respectively in 2010 and 2014, of pathologies developed due to their professional exposure to asbestos. Criticizing a "double fault" by Robert Martin, - that of a "wrongful omission" but also that of the production of a forgery, the prosecutor asked for a "firm response" from the court, i.e. three years' imprisonment, two of which suspended sentence - the firm part can be carried out at home under electronic surveillance -, as well as a fine of 30,000 euros.

"These deliberate mistakes (...) are neither more nor less the result of glaring incompetence mixed with a form of indifference", she developed, considering that the fake, a mail that he would have created from all documents and dated December 2006 to certify having transmitted the asbestos diagnosis, "this is what makes it go from doubt to the certainty of the fault committed", and "the certainty of not wanting to assume responsibility for it".

“If this department was negligent, I want to hear it. Explaining that he made a fake, that he decided to knowingly ignore the rules, is the antithesis of what he is,” pleaded Thomas Callen, Robert Martin’s lawyer, asking for his relaxed. He also deplored the absence from the hearing of the city of Marseille and the management of the theatre. “For 40 years, I was a hard worker, I spent myself without counting”, defended Robert Martin.

When this diagnosis, written in November 2006, had finally been brought to the attention of the management of the theater, in November 2008, the letter had “liked a bomb”, according to the lawyer for three civil parties, Cyril Michael. “Why did a positive diagnosis take two years to arrive on the theater management desk?” he asked himself: “The question for my clients today is whether Mr. Martin is willing to answer for his acts, if he is a liar and a forger".