Federal-Mogul Corp.: Asbestos Exposure, Turner & Newall, and Trust Fund Claims

Company History & the Turner & Newall Acquisition

Federal-Mogul Corporation traces its origins to 1899, when it was founded in Detroit, Michigan, as a manufacturer of bearings and seals for the rapidly expanding automobile industry. Throughout the twentieth century the company grew through acquisition into one of the world's preeminent auto parts suppliers, with product lines spanning engine components, friction materials, gaskets, sealing systems, and electrical parts. Its brands — Fel-Pro, Champion Spark Plug, Moog, Wagner, and others — were household names in automotive service shops across North America and Europe.

For much of its history, Federal-Mogul's asbestos exposure was significant but manageable within the context of U.S. litigation. The company's Fel-Pro subsidiary manufactured spiral-wound and sheet gaskets that contained asbestos fibers, and its Flexitallic gasket operations added additional liability. But these exposures, while serious, were comparable to those faced by dozens of other industrial manufacturers navigating the asbestos litigation wave that began reshaping American industry in the 1980s. Federal-Mogul was defending claims, paying settlements, and continuing to operate as a viable going concern well into the 1990s.

Everything changed in 1998. In that year, Federal-Mogul paid approximately $2.8 billion to acquire Turner & Newall PLC, a British industrial conglomerate headquartered in Manchester, England. T&N had been central to the UK's asbestos industry since the early twentieth century. Its Ferodo brand produced brake linings, clutch facings, and friction materials sold worldwide. Its Caposite division manufactured asbestos insulation products. T&N operated asbestos fiber-processing mills in Rochdale, Lancashire, and at Trafford Park in Manchester — facilities where thousands of workers had spent careers breathing chrysotile, crocidolite, and amosite fibers with little or no respiratory protection.

Federal-Mogul's management and its financial advisors understood that T&N carried asbestos liability, but the scale of the problem was catastrophically underestimated. T&N had already settled thousands of UK claims and faced ongoing litigation in both British courts and in the United States from workers who had been exposed to T&N products. After the acquisition closed, the pace of new claims accelerated rather than slowing. By 2000, Federal-Mogul was spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on T&N asbestos settlements and legal costs. The company's cash flow buckled under the weight of these obligations combined with ordinary business demands.

On October 1, 2001, Federal-Mogul filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, and its UK subsidiaries filed concurrent insolvency proceedings in the United Kingdom. The bankruptcy reorganization took years to complete. Under Section 524(g) of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, the confirmed plan of reorganization established the Federal-Mogul Asbestos Personal Injury Trust, which was funded with cash and stock from the reorganized company. Crucially, the trust was structured with two distinct subfunds reflecting the two separate corporate asbestos legacies: the FMP subfund for Federal-Mogul's domestic liabilities, and the T&N subfund for Turner & Newall's claims. The company emerged from bankruptcy in 2007 as a private company and was subsequently acquired by Tenneco in 2018.

Asbestos-Containing Products & Exposure Pathways

Federal-Mogul and its acquired subsidiaries produced a wide range of asbestos-containing products sold to automotive, industrial, and construction markets. The table below identifies the primary products, the brands under which they were sold, their asbestos content, and the occupational groups most commonly exposed during use or installation.

Exposure risk was highest during activities that disturbed the asbestos-containing material — grinding brake drums, blowing out brake assemblies with compressed air, cutting gaskets to fit, or sanding friction surfaces. These processes released respirable asbestos fibers directly into the breathing zone of the worker performing the task and into the air of any enclosed workspace where bystanders were present. Studies of auto mechanics who regularly performed brake work found asbestos fiber concentrations in enclosed service bays that far exceeded modern occupational exposure limits.

Key Facilities Associated with Federal-Mogul Asbestos Exposure

Federal-Mogul and Turner & Newall operated facilities on both sides of the Atlantic that are associated with significant asbestos exposures. The following table identifies the primary sites documented in litigation and in public health records.

Turner & Newall's UK Legacy

To understand the scale of Federal-Mogul's asbestos liability, it is essential to understand what Turner & Newall was. Founded in 1920 through the merger of several British asbestos concerns, T&N grew to become the dominant asbestos business in the United Kingdom and one of the most significant in the world. At its peak, T&N controlled asbestos mines in southern Africa, fiber-processing mills in northern England, and a global distribution network that supplied raw asbestos to manufacturers across Europe, Asia, and North America. Its subsidiary companies bore names that became deeply associated with asbestos disease: Ferodo Limited in Chapel-en-le-Frith, Turner Brothers Asbestos Company in Rochdale, and numerous others operating under the T&N corporate umbrella.

Turner Brothers Asbestos Company's Rochdale mill was particularly notorious in the annals of industrial disease. For decades, the mill processed raw asbestos fiber — spinning it into yarn, weaving it into cloth and rope, and incorporating it into a range of industrial products. Workers at the mill were exposed to airborne asbestos concentrations that, by any modern standard, were catastrophically high. Former mill workers and their families — including children who played on asbestos-contaminated clothing brought home from work — were diagnosed with mesothelioma and asbestosis at rates that drew the attention of British occupational health researchers as early as the 1950s. The Rochdale mesothelioma cluster became one of the best-documented asbestos disease clusters in medical literature, studied by epidemiologists including Dr. J.C. Wagner and cited in litigation on both sides of the Atlantic for generations.

Ferodo Limited's Chapel-en-le-Frith factory had a similarly troubled occupational health history. Ferodo was Europe's leading manufacturer of friction materials through most of the twentieth century, and its brake linings were installed in vehicles from everyday automobiles to racing cars to heavy commercial lorries. The friction materials incorporated chrysotile asbestos as a heat-resistant reinforcing fiber, and production workers were exposed during mixing, pressing, grinding, and finishing operations. Ferodo brake linings were also exported throughout the world, making the brand a common reference point in asbestos litigation involving mechanics in the United States, Australia, Europe, and elsewhere. Many claimants in U.S. trust fund proceedings identify Ferodo as the primary brake product they used over the course of decades of automotive service work.

T&N's Caposite brand insulation board was manufactured at Trafford Park in Manchester and sold across the British construction and industrial market. Caposite boards were used as fire protection in buildings, ships, and industrial installations, and their cutting, shaping, or removal during construction and renovation created significant respirable fiber exposure for tradespeople who were rarely informed of the hazard. Shipbuilders in particular made extensive use of Caposite products, contributing to the elevated mesothelioma rates documented in British shipyard workers from yards on the Clyde, the Tyne, and elsewhere.

T&N's internal documents, made public during litigation, revealed that company management had been aware of the health hazards of asbestos for decades before meaningful warnings were placed on products or adequate protections were extended to workers. Documents from the 1930s and 1940s showed internal discussions of dust-related disease among T&N employees. This knowledge — combined with the company's decision to continue manufacturing and marketing asbestos products without adequate warnings — formed the factual basis for punitive damages claims that drove settlement values higher and compounded the liability Federal-Mogul inherited when it completed the 1998 acquisition.

When Federal-Mogul's executives later examined what they had purchased, the internal T&N documents painted a stark picture. The liability was not simply a matter of how many workers had been exposed — it was also a matter of what T&N's management had known and when. This knowledge-based liability added a moral and punitive dimension to the claims that made early settlement at modest values extremely difficult and drove the company inexorably toward bankruptcy.

Trust Fund Status: Two Subfunds Explained

The Federal-Mogul Asbestos Personal Injury Trust was established as part of the company's confirmed Chapter 11 plan of reorganization and became operational after Federal-Mogul emerged from bankruptcy in 2007. Unlike the single-pool trust structures used by many other asbestos companies, the Federal-Mogul trust is divided into two distinct subfunds, each with its own claim history, funding level, and payment percentage. Understanding which subfund applies to your exposure is critical to filing correctly and receiving appropriate compensation.

The FMP Subfund — Approximately 12.2% Payment Percentage

The FMP subfund covers asbestos personal injury claims arising from Federal-Mogul's own products and operations — primarily the Fel-Pro, Flexitallic, and Victor gasket brands, and the domestic friction product operations conducted under the Federal-Mogul and Wagner names. Claims under the FMP subfund are typically filed by pipefitters, plumbers, boilermakers, and auto mechanics who worked with Fel-Pro or Flexitallic gaskets, or by workers at Federal-Mogul's U.S. manufacturing facilities in states including Illinois, Michigan, and Texas.

As of the most recently published payment percentage information, the FMP subfund pays claimants approximately 12.2% of the scheduled value of their claim. The scheduled value is determined by the trust's disease level schedule, which assigns base compensation amounts to different asbestos-related diagnoses. Mesothelioma — the most serious asbestos-caused cancer — receives the highest scheduled value. Lung cancer with documented asbestos exposure, asbestosis, and pleural disease receive progressively lower scheduled values. The 12.2% payment percentage means that a claim with a scheduled value of $100,000 would receive $12,200 from the FMP subfund. Many claimants with Federal-Mogul exposure also have claims against multiple other asbestos trusts, and the aggregate compensation across all eligible trusts can be substantially higher.

The T&N Subfund — Approximately 3.9% Payment Percentage

The T&N subfund covers asbestos personal injury claims arising from the products and operations of Turner & Newall and its subsidiary companies, including Ferodo friction products, Caposite insulation, T&N asbestos textiles and ropes, and asbestos fiber processed at T&N's Rochdale and Trafford Park facilities. Because the T&N liability was larger relative to the trust's funding level — reflecting the sheer number of T&N workers and downstream product users worldwide — the T&N subfund pays at a lower rate than the FMP subfund: approximately 3.9% of scheduled claim value.

The lower payment percentage reflects the enormous number of eligible claimants on the T&N side. Tens of thousands of former T&N workers and their families in the UK, the United States, and elsewhere have filed or are eligible to file claims, and the trust must preserve sufficient assets to pay future claimants who have not yet been diagnosed. Asbestos-related diseases have latency periods of 20 to 50 years, meaning that individuals exposed to T&N products in the 1970s may only now be receiving diagnoses of mesothelioma or other asbestos diseases. The trust's actuarial modeling must account for this ongoing stream of future claims. The 3.9% payment percentage does not necessarily mean a smaller absolute payment — if the underlying disease scheduled value is high, as with mesothelioma, even a lower percentage can produce significant compensation — but claimants and their attorneys need to understand the mathematics when evaluating options.

Determining Which Subfund Applies — and Stacking Claims

The determining factor for subfund assignment is the specific product or facility that caused the claimant's asbestos exposure. Claimants whose exposure arose exclusively from Fel-Pro or Flexitallic gaskets file under the FMP subfund. Claimants whose exposure arose from Ferodo brake products, Caposite insulation, or T&N fiber operations file under the T&N subfund. Claimants with exposure from multiple Federal-Mogul and T&N sources may file under both subfunds simultaneously, effectively stacking the compensation received from each.

In practice, determining which products caused a particular worker's exposure requires a detailed work history review. An asbestos attorney with experience in Federal-Mogul claims will cross-reference the claimant's occupation, employer, and work locations against product databases identifying which Federal-Mogul or T&N products were typically present at those job sites during those time periods. Documentation such as invoices, purchase orders, employer procurement records, supplier catalogs, and co-worker testimony can all help establish product identification when memory alone is insufficient.

Both subfunds require standard asbestos trust documentation: a medical diagnosis from a qualified physician confirming an asbestos-related disease (mesothelioma, asbestosis, lung cancer with asbestos exposure, or significant pleural disease), evidence of exposure to a covered Federal-Mogul or T&N product, and compliance with the trust's claim review procedures. Claims may be submitted through the trust's expedited review process for straightforward cases or through individual review for complex claims seeking amounts above the scheduled value. The trust uses an electronic data interchange filing system, and claims submitted through qualified attorneys typically move through review more efficiently than pro se submissions.

Frequently Asked Questions