[ad_1]
Authorities in Genoa on Wednesday issued arrest warrants for several senior company executives tasked with overseeing a bridge that collapsed in the city in 2018, killing 43 people, the clearest attempt to date to hold company executives responsible for the tragedy.
Prosecutors have issued arrest warrants against the former managing director and other officials of the Autostrade per l’Italia motorway operator, which managed the Morandi Bridge, in an investigation into the negligence of Highway.
Giovanni Castellucci, the former CEO of Atlantia, of which Autostrade per l’Italia is a subsidiary, Michele Donferri Mitelli, the former managing director of the company’s maintenance, and Paolo Berti, its director of operations and maintenance , were all placed under house arrest.
The decision was welcomed by the families of the victims, who have waited for years for someone to be held accountable.
“This is an extremely important day,” echoed Egle Possetti, the head of a committee representing the families of Morandi’s victims in a statement. “For us parents, waiting for light for 27 months now, our hearts are starting to warm up again.
A larger investigation into why the bridge – which spanned more than half a mile across a riverbed, residential buildings and warehouses, connecting the west and east of Genoa – abruptly collapsed on a hazy morning in the summer of 2018 is still going on.
The warrants follow another investigation which prosecutors say shows the company was not taking care of the bridge. Autostrade’s failure to remove faulty noise barriers on the roadway and along some 18 miles of highway around Genoa. Parts of barriers bent in the wind, parts fall and put drivers in danger.
While the noise barrier investigation is not aimed at determining the cause of the 2018 collapse, prosecutors say the warped barriers may have impacted the integrity of the bridge.
Italian finance police said the company has been aware of potentially dangerous flaws in noise barriers since 2017, but did not replace them to save money, while making billions of euros in profits.
Residents complained about the persistent noise from the bridge. On at least two occasions in recent years, when barriers broke in high winds, the operator only partially repaired them.
During a wiretap, Autostrade officials compared the adhesive material used to anchor the viaduct barriers to a type of glue used by school children.
Investigators found that Autostrade and its managers’ management of defective barriers amounted to “serious criminal conduct, linked to entrepreneurial policies aimed at maximizing profits from the contract with the state, by reducing and delaying the expenses necessary to maintenance of highways, to the detriment of public safety, ”wrote the judge who ordered the arrest warrants in a court document obtained by The New York Times.
In a phone call a year after the collapse, Mr. Donferri Mitelli, responsible for the maintenance of the roadways managed by the company, asked a colleague to remove the documents relating to the bridge from his office under the guise of darkness and meet him in a neighborhood in southern Rome, according to a court document.
Autostrade said in a statement on Wednesday that sound barriers were set late last year on more than 60 kilometers, or around 37 miles, of Italian motorways. The company said it first became aware of the problem in December 2019, after the bridge collapsed.
Most of Autostrade’s top executives left the company or were fired last year, which business observers saw as a change of course for the Benetton family, the major shareholders of Atlantia, the parent company. Autostrade. Since the bridge collapsed, the company has been negotiating an agreement with the Italian government to keep control of the country’s highways.
A criminal trial is expected to begin in early 2021 over the company’s role in the bridge collapse. But over the past two years, prosecutors have used a series of complex technical hearings to determine the cause of the collapse.
Around 72 people, including officials from Autostrade and its maintenance company, SPEA, as well as the Italian Ministry of Transport, were questioned during the hearings.
Most of the relatives of those killed in the collapse have already been financially compensated by Autostrade and will not participate in the trial, but a few families have rejected compensation and are still seeking justice in court.
“We believe that Autostrade did not do the maintenance or did it poorly on the Morandi Bridge,” said Antonio Cirillo, a lawyer for the family of Giovanni Battiloro, 29, who died with two friends when his car dived from the viaduct. “What happened to Giovanni and his family should not happen in a civilized country.”
[ad_2]
Source link