Ponte Morandi, Swiss Re only settles the damages to third parties
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Only the civil liability towards third parties has been liquidated, while not the damage to the viaduct. And for this reason, the bill paid by Swiss Re Corporate Solutions was only 37 million in the end. This is the outcome of the double litigation that the Swiss company opened against Aspi following the collapse of the Morandi bridge. The reason? At the time of signing the contract, the motorway company would not have provided all the necessary information on the state of health of the viaduct, which later collapsed in August 2018 causing the death of 43 people.
“The compensation for the damage to the Morandi bridge was rejected because Aspi had not given all the information at the time of updating the insurance stipulation, the problems of the viaduct had not been highlighted as the good diligence of the insured would have required”. Luca Kovatsch, former representative for Italy of Swiss Re, the Swiss insurance company with which Aspi had insured the entire motorway network, said in the courtroom during the trial for the collapse of the bridge.
“We liquidated the damage to third parties. While the damage to the viaduct was not. Our hierarchical chain immediately doubted the effective validity of the policy. The main complaint raised was that the risk had not been described correctly. The client hadn’t given us all the information on Morandi’s real conditions». The insurance issue was also addressed by the other three witnesses heard in recent days.
In 2016, in fact, Aspi had the viaduct included among the “nominated” works, thus increasing the compensation from 100 million to 300 million. The reason was explained by Umberto Vallarino, manager of Atlantia and Autostrade: «It was a work that I had known since I was a child – he explained -. I’m Ligurian and they used to go there 50 times a year. I made that transition due to the economic importance it has for the region, then because it was in an urbanized context where there were houses underneath and a railway passed, due to the damage from the lack of income given the increase in traffic and given the high costs of a possible demolition, reconstruction and disposal of debris. According to the prosecutor, however, that passage was linked to the inclusion of the wording “risk of collapse to delay maintenance” in the risk catalogue. A catalog that Vallarino would never have seen and that he didn’t even know existed. However, the manager was denied by his former employee Lionetti who said he knew about the catalog but not about the risk of collapse.
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