AUSTRALIA
WA Today
David Ellery
Reporter for The Canberra Times.
The Catholic Church Insurance company CCI is staying mum on whether or not it will try to recover almost $9 million that may have been wrongly paid out on behalf of the Marist Brothers.
The payments, made to Canberra victims of serial sex abusers “Kostka” John Chute and Gregory Sutton, might not have been made if CCI had been told the Marist Brothers had known for decades that the men were paedophiles and did nothing to remove them from contact with children.
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.
Details on how both the Marist Brothers and CCI responded to the abuse of dozens of children in the ACT over many decades by Sutton and Chute were revealed at the Canberra hearings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse last month.
Francis Sullivan, the Canberra-based CEO of the church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council, sat through the hearings.
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