There will probably be no one to blame for the 19 workers who died and 82 who became ill due to exposure to asbestos at Firema, a historic company Caserta – now called TFA after the acquisition in 2015 by the Indians of Titagarh – which produces railway carriages.
The deputy prosecutor of Santa Maria Capua Vetere Giacomo Urbano has in fact requested the acquittal due to lack of evidence for seven former Firema executives accused of manslaughter and bodily harm, namely the former managing directors Mario Fiore and Giovanni Fiore and the senior former executives Enzo Ianuario, Maurizio Russo, Giovanni Iardino, Giuseppe Ricci and Carlo Regazzoni.
Ricci and Russo had already emerged unscathed through acquittal from the first trial, in which the Prosecutor's Office had charged them with the less serious crime of removal and wilful omission of precautions against accidents at work.
Then the investigating office opened a second investigation for manslaughter, investigating other administrators who had succeeded one another over the years, and following a path similar to that of the Turin Prosecutor's Office in relation to the Eternit affair, where the owner of the company, the Swiss entrepreneur Stephan Schmidheiny, had been saved by the statute of limitations in the Supreme Court after being sentenced in the first and second instance to 16 and 18 years for manslaughter in relation to dozens of deaths from asbestos.
The investigating office had thus decided to open a new case against Schmidheiny for wilful homicide (later downgraded to manslaughter), also taking advantage of a 2016 ruling by the Constitutional Court, which had declared the entrepreneur liable to be tried again without violating the legal principle of “ne bis in idem”.
In Santa Maria Capua Vetere, however, the testimonies of the sick workers were not precise nor considered relevant; too much time had passed since the events, prior to 1990 when asbestos was eliminated from the company, so many former employees did not remember. The court will return in mid-October.
Article published on 3 October 2022 - 14:57
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