Ex Ilva, the legal battle resumes, confiscation of the plants is requested to be revoked

Listen to the audio version of the article

Revocation of the confiscation of the iron and steel plants in Taranto with “actual and not potential restitution” to Ilva in extraordinary administration, the owner company that leased them to Acciaierie d’Italia. This is the request that the company’s lawyers (Angelo Loreto and Filippo Dinacci) made to the Court of Appeal with the appeal of the first degree sentence. All in view of the new trial on the crime of environmental disaster contested by the old Riva management, which left the scene in mid-2013 with the group being placed in receivership decided by the Government.

For the lawyers, «over the years following the seizure, the results of the environmental investigations and of the inspections carried out by the public control bodies excluded the emission limits set by the regulatory framework for the sector being exceeded; the results of the surveys on air quality are unequivocal in this sense. Basically, risk indicators for the community and the environment have never emerged, not even at the potential stage». However “these elements were not considered sufficient conditions for the return of the seized plants to the rightful owner, Ilva in as”.

Lawyers: the zeroing of risk is utopian

And therefore, for the lawyers, “the Court of Assizes seems to orient itself in the utopian logic of the zeroing of the risk, rather than in the ordinary (and, let it be allowed, orthodox) one of the allowed risk”. It should also be noted that the situation of the Taranto iron and steel company is no longer the same as it was ten years ago, when the seizure took place, that the environmental plan is now nearing completion and that the control mechanisms are now more effective.

“Wrong calculation of 2.1 billion”

The sentence, continues the appeal of Ilva in extraordinary administration, also applied the ancillary sanction (“erroneous application”) of the confiscation for the equivalent of the profit from an administrative offense for 2.100 billion. Calculated on “a hypothesized cost savings estimated with great approximation by the judicial custodian Barbara Valenzano” when it emerged from the hearing that “the cost savings attributable to the charges would amount to 1.327 billion” due to “the plant adaptation requirements aimed at preventing the disputed emission phenomena”. However, with the transaction, the lawyers point out, «the previous ownership» of the Rivas «returned an amount equal to 1.442 billion euros to Ilva. It is therefore easy to understand how the injured party, the State, has already received from the previous owner the equivalent of the claimed cost savings».

The clash on the penal shield

Although the confiscation will be effective only after any confirmation by the Court of Cassation and the plants are currently seized with the faculty of use, the request for revocation crosses the start of the parliamentary process for the conversion into law of decree no. 2 of 2023. It is the decree on strategic companies, in force since 6 January, better known as the ex Ilva decree. The provision, approved by the Council of Ministers on 28 December, in fact authorizes Invitalia, a public shareholder of Acciaierie d’Italia, to subscribe to “share capital increases or shareholder loans” of up to one billion euros in Acciaierie itself. Furthermore, the penal shield is reintroduced as a general measure. «Anyone who acts in order to implement a measure authorizing the continuation of the activity of an industrial plant or part of it declared to be of national strategic interest, is not punishable for the facts that derive from compliance with the provisions dictated by the measure aimed at protecting the juridical assets protected by the incriminating norms if he has acted in conformity with the same prescriptions» reads article 7 of the decree. “A rule of common sense” defined it by the Minister of Enterprise, Adolfo Urso. But which has raised the strong protest of Pd, Cinque Stelle and Verdi, as well as the environmentalist world which sees in the law a blocking of the action of the Judiciary together with that on the seizure inserted in article 6 (in case of seizure, “the judge orders the continuation of the activity with the help of a judicial administrator»). Against the penal shield there will be a protest garrison by environmentalists under the Prefecture on January 17th.