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Questions are being raised over payments to some Australian abuse victims after a religious order sought how to keep information from an insurer.
Catholic Church insurer CCI won’t say whether it will try to recover A$9million of payments to abuse victims on behalf of the Marist Brothers.
The payments were made to victims of two brothers, John Chute and Gregory Sutton.
But there might have been no payouts if CCI had been told the order knew the pair were paedophiles and did nothing to stop them having contact with children, Fairfax reported.
In 2008, senior members of the order took advice from their lawyers on how to prevent CCI from learning Chute had been offending as early as 1960.
Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has heard how the order and CCI responded to the abuse of dozens of children over many decades by Sutton and Chute.
Francis Sullivan, the Canberra-based CEO of the church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council, sat through the hearings.
He said he had not previously been aware the order and its lawyers had discussed how to keep Chute’s offending history secret from its insurers.
The commission was told the Marist Brothers had shipped Sutton out of Australia within days of the start of a police investigation.
It was also told that measures intended to prevent CCI investigators from discovering information were discussed by the order and its legal team.
A commission spokesman declined to comment on whether or not these concerns, which may constitute breaches of the law, had been referred to the police or other authorities.
“The Commission may refer information to police or other authorities,” Fairfax was told.
Early this month, the royal commission moved on to examine allegations involving Swimming Australia.
These date from the 1960s to 1980s and relate to three swimming coaches abusing children under their care.
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