Turin prosecutors on Thursday
appealed to the Italy's highest appeals court, the Cassation
Court, against a judge's decision to downgrade charges in the
Eternit asbestos-deaths case from voluntary homicide to culpable
homicide and her splitting the trial into four branches,
shifting almost all cases from Turin to Naples, Reggio Emilia
and Vercelli.
Only two of the 258 cases remain in Turin.
The charges against Swiss entrepreneur Stephan Schmidheiny as
part of the Eternit asbestos case were changed on November 29.
In 2012 he was found guilty of negligence at Eternit's
now-defunct Italian factories in the 1970s and 1980s and
sentenced to 18 years in prison, but the Cassation Court
overturned the verdict in November 2014 on the grounds that the
case had timed out.
The Constitutional Court in July green-lit a multiple
manslaughter trial against him for the asbestos deaths of 258
workers at four Eternit cement plants while he owned the
company.
In the November ruling, a Turin judge ruled that about a
hundred of the cases had reached the statute of limitations and
ordered that others be transferred to the Reggio Emilia,
Vercelli and Naples prosecutor's offices.
Only two cases remain in Turin, for which a trial will begin
on June 14.
Schmidheiny's defense lawyer, Astolfo Di Amato, called it a
"huge victory", while one of the lawyers representing the
plaintiffs called it "a failure for the administration of
justice".
The lawyer, Sergio Bonetto, noted that the transfer of the
cases to three other prosecutors' offices would significantly
lengthen the time "before the cause of and responsibility for
these deaths can be ascertained".
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