Hanson, the conglomerate in the throes of breaking itself up, yesterday sought to play down the significance of one of its demerged businesses being managed from Grimsby - even though the company will be registered and headquartered in the US. If the Supreme Court gave the green light, it is likely to hear an appeal in the middle of next year. "In the meantime, there is a bow wave of cases of individuals who are ready to turn their cases into tort cases if Georgine falls away."Many of them were likely to prove "questionable", he said, but T&N would still have to make an additional provision. "Our best estimate is that by October, we would need an extra pounds 50m on costs, but I would stress that is a best guess, not a forecast."The comments came as T&N reported a slump in profits from pounds 73.2m to pounds 58.1m in the six months to June, hit by destocking costs and redundancy charges.Investment Column, page 16.

Along with the announcement of lower than expected profits yesterday, the shares dropped 8.5p to 135p. The potential new charge, which would double this year's provisions for asbestos, stems from May's decision by the Third Circuit of the US Court of Appeals that the so-called Georgine settlement, reached in 1994 between asbestos victims and 20 asbestos companies, failed to meet the criteria of a class action.The companies, grouped under the Center for Claims Resolution, have appealed to the US Supreme Court, but Sir Colin Hope, the T&N chairman who is to drop his executive duties, warned yesterday that if the court declined to hear the appeal "Georgine will fall away in seven days".He believed they had the basis of an appeal, given that other courts had come to a contrary conclusion. T&N warned yesterday that it could have to pay out pounds 50m in new asbestos claims if it failed to overturn a recent US court ruling. The courts decided that a multi-million pound industry-wide settlement with claimants was illegal. The news yesterday sparked renewed fears that the group, which formerly as Turner & Newall was one of the world's biggest asbestos manufacturers, could face a flood of legal claims.

The first rescuers arrived shortly after 1pm and reported that most of the three-engine jet's wreckage was scattered around the top of the small Opera mountain while the rest was found further down the slopes.The miners, most of them Ukrainians, represented a considerable part of the Russian community on Spitzbergen, which numbers around 2,000 people.They were due to replace more than 100 other Russian miners who should have returned to Moscow on the doomed flight.Their colleagues wept when they were told the plane had crashed a few minutes away from the landing site, Nor- wegian radio reported.Spitzbergen is a Norwegian coal-mining settlement and Russia and Norway share the island's resources under a treaty dating back to the 1920s.. The jet crashed at a remote site, with no roads nearby."No survivors have been found and our first aid staff are returning from the crash site," a local government official said.The Norwegian aviation inspectorate said the plane was making a normal instrument landing .The miners were travelling to work in one of the island's three open- cast coal mines Some of them were accompanied by their families. The plane was flying in a relief group of Russian miners and their families who work in the Norwegian coal mining settlement there. The crash, the worst in Norwegian aviation history, happened as the chartered Tupolev jet approached the island's only airport.The island governor's office said no survivors had been found and denied a claim from Moscow that five people had escaped from the wreckage."This is totally unknown to us and wrong," the Norwegians said."They must have walked away from the site without us noticing, so that has got to be wrong." A spokeswoman for the Russian Emergencies Ministry said they based their claim on a report from the crash site.But a spokesman for Vnukovo Airlines, which had chartered the plane to the coal company that was flying the miners to the settlement, could not confirm this.The accident occurred in bad weather six miles east of Longyearbyen.Air traffic officials said they had lost contact with the aircraft shortly before it was due to land. Oslo - All 141 passengers and crew were feared killed when a Russian airliner crashed into a mountain on the remote Arctic island of Spitzbergen yesterday. In a country where a few white businesses dominate the commercial sector, there is a fear that black empowerment will do no more than replace six fat white cats with six fat black ones. President Mandela refers to it as "black enrichment" which aims to to spread economic benefits more widely among blacks.. "Times Media only constitutes 1-2 per cent of Johnnic's profits, but the new owners consider it one of the most desirable assets."There are other misgivings.

They complained there was a racist assumption that black owners were more dangerous to a free press than white ones.Yesterday, Mr Bruce said he feared Mr Ramaphosa and the NEC would interfere with the titles' editorial stance. A media empire could be priceless to Mr Rama- phosa, 10 years younger than Mr Mbeki, in establishing an alternative power base.In the later stages of negotiations between Anglo American and the NEC, a row erupted at Times Media over last minute attempts to establish an editorial charter. He said Anglo American bought Times Media in the 1970s to prevent Nationalist businessmen buying the group and using it to support apartheid."It has become clear that the objective of this deal is political rather than commercial," Mr Bruce said. Journalists were not consulted about the charter, drafted by Nigel Bruce, editor of the Financial Mail.Black journalists were insulted that a charter, including clauses protecting editors' jobs in the face of editorial interference from future owners, had not been considered necessary before. His departure from politics is thought to have been prompted by President Nelson Mandela's decision to annoint Thabo Mbeki, the deputy president, as his unofficial successor. In other parts of the continent, nationalism has been the fate of business after black liberation.The ANC, like the Afrikaner Nationalists, came to power threatening nationalisation but then opted for a more free-market approach.

Celebrations of the deal were marred by concern about media ownership and editorial independence at Times Media, part of the Johnnic group, which publishes Sunday Times, Business Day and Financial Mail newspapers.Mr Ramaphosa is a leading light in New Africa Investments (Nail), the NEC's most influential member. The drive to transfer economic power to blacks in South Africa has reached a milestone with the decision by Anglo American, the country biggest corporation, to sell the bulk of its stake in the industrial and media group, Johnnic, to black investors. The deal, which is politically rather than commercially motivated, mirrors Anglo American's decision in 1964 to sell General Mining to Boer businessmen, following the rise of Afrikaner nationalism. Then, the country's business sector was dominated by the English. General Mining became Gencor, today a multibillion-rand empire, and provided the foundation for the Afrikaner advance into the business sector. "This deal has to succeed," said one analyst yesterday. "Black businessmen have to show they can do it, too."The 1.5bn rand (pounds 215m) deal between Anglo American and the National Empowerment Consortium, representing 50 black economic interest groups, took two years to reach fruition It gives the NEC a 47.7 per cent stake in Johnnic.