FEBRUARY 13th, 2012 - SENTENCE OF THE GREAT ASBESTOS TRIAL of TORINO
Channel: DUSTasbestostrial
Date: 2012-04-27

Responsible for the death of 3,000 ItalianS: a verdict of historic importance

Stephan Schmidheiny (65) used to be the owner of the Swiss-Belgian industrial group Eternit (ETEX), which was in turn a major shareholder of the Italian subsidiary of Eternit between 1976 and 1986.
The Belgian Baron Jean-Louis de Cartier de Marchienne (90) was a director and minority shareholder of Eternit Italy. Today, they were both sentenced to 16 years prison by an Italian court in Turin. The verdicts are not effective until final, meaning the defendants have the right to go to a Court of Appeal and to the Supreme Court before they must undergo their verdicts. This could take many years and is, I suspect, the most likely outcome to happen, considering Eternit's usual game of denial and delay.
 
The public prosecutor, Mr. Guariniello, had demanded twenty years in jail for both men, for 'causing a continuing disaster in health and environment' and for wilfully neglecting safety regulations in the workplace. He is to be admired for being the first public prosecutor in Europe, perhaps even in the world, to undertake such an important prosecution -- and of such breath-taking scale. Even today, this massive scale was reflected in the attendance of over two thousand asbestos victims and representatives of reputedly more than sixty asbestos victims associations -- all packed together like sardines in four court rooms of the enormous Palace of Justice.