A former director of an Italian Eternit factory has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter, Italian media report. Stephan Schmidheiny, a Swiss businessman, was on trial for the deaths of 392 people in the vicinity of the northwestern town of Casale Monferrato, where he was director of the country’s main Eternit factory between 1976 and 1986.
The victims died from the carcinogenic substance asbestos, which Eternit used to use in its building materials. The lawyers of the Swiss, who asked for an acquittal, are appealing. The court also awarded provisional damages of more than 100 million euros to the municipality of Casale Monferrato in the Piedmont region, whose capital is Turin, the Italian state and the victims.
The businessman had already received thirteen years in prison in 2012 during an earlier trial, but the Court of Cassation overturned that ruling two years later. In February, Schmidheiny was sentenced to one year and eight months in prison in another appeal case for the death of a worker at the Cavagnolo factory, near Turin. In 2019, he was sentenced to four years in prison in Turin, but appealed. In April 2022, a court in Naples sentenced him to three years and six months in prison, also for involuntary manslaughter.
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