New turnaround in the Montefibre ter trial on the
deaths from asbestos
that occurred in the Verbania plant: today the Court of Appeal of Turin sentenced the three defendants and ordered compensation to the civil parties for around one and a half million euros.
With the charge of manslaughter, the judges, recognizing the extenuating circumstances, inflicted
one year in prison on Giorgio Mazzanti and 11 months on both Bruno Quaglieri and Gianluigi Poletti, all former executives.
The sentences are suspended on conditional basis.
With regard to two other defendants, Luigi Ceriani and Carlo Vannini, the crimes are extinguished as they died in the meantime.
As can be seen from the device read in the courtroom, Mazzanti, in particular, was
held responsible for the deaths of five people, Poletti and Quaglieri for four of these deaths.
With regard to the defendants themselves, the Court ruled that it should not proceed with regard to the deaths of seven other people, as the statute of limitations had intervened.
The damages awarded to the civil parties, for a total of one and a half million, also include those established for the families of these seven victims.
In total, therefore, the civil parties compensated are 40:
they are 37 relatives of the deceased
, the Italian Association exposed to asbestos (Aiea), the Democratic Medicine Association and the CGIL Territorial Labor Chamber of Novara and Verbano-Cusio-Ossola.
For the lawyer Laura Mara, who represents the IAEA and Democratic Medicine, it is "a great victory, an important sentence in the Italian jurisprudential panorama. What matters is not so much the years of sentence or the fact that the defendants days in prison - he added, but it is the principle that must pass".
For the lawyer this "means that times have changed compared to the dark ones in which the jurisprudence always imposed certain limits with regard to asbestos-related pathologies".
It is
the third time that the Court of Appeal has expressed its opinion on the case
of Montefibre Verbania: the story began in 2011 with the acquittal in first instance by the Court of Verbania.
After which the first turnaround on appeal, with the conviction of the defendants.
The Cassation then annulled and sent it back to the Turin judges of second instance, who issued an acquittal sentence.
The Medicina Democratica and IAEA associations and the Attorney General finally appealed to the Supreme Court.
Appeal accepted with the referral of the proceedings for the third time to the Court of Appeal, which this morning condemned and ordered compensation of one and a half million.
The reasons will be filed within 90 days.
