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“I spent more money on the investigation than on the safety of the bridge” – Corriere.it

The request

Under the dust of Morandi the magistrates of the Ligurian capital think they have unearthed evidence of a very extensive responsibility that led them to ask for indictment of 59 suspects, including executives, managers and technicians of Autostrade per l’Italia (Aspi) when it belonged to the Benetton group, the subsidiary Spea (later deprecated) which was supposed to provide for the maintenance and the Ministry of Infrastructure (MIT) which was required to check the state of health of the bridge. It includes the top management of Aspi: the former CEO Giovanni Castellucci, the former general manager Paolo Berti, the former maintenance manager Michele Donferri; those of Spea headed by the former to Antonino Galatà, and, for MIT, the former head of the Supervisory Department Vincenzo Cinelli and his predecessor Mauro Coletta. The magistrates lined up an endless series of “omissions”, they wrote of inadequate “activities of diagnosing the deterioration of the structure and monitoring its evolution”, of the failure to install “suitable systems to prevent the failure of the tie rods” and of “systems monitoring … so that interventions that would have prevented the collapse were also carried out on the stays of pile 9 (the collapsed one, ed). A “negligence in ignoring the signals found upstream of the 1994 intervention and subsequently detected in their progression from that date until the disaster”. For the prosecutor of Genoa, Francesco Cozzi, it is also “inertia and conscious guilt, with prediction, because you can imagine that an event could happen but you act convinced that it will not happen ».



The hypothesis

The motive for the disaster? Pm, periti and Guardia di Finanza have identified it in the company policy aimed at maximizing profits and saving on maintenance costs. In the more than 18 years in which the private concessionaire has managed the bridge, 488 thousand euros have been spent on structural interventions(26 thousand per year). “The software used for the investigation alone cost 2 million euros,” said the deputy prosecutor Paolo D’Ovidio. Here they are, the numbers of the paradox. “And let’s add all the others, including the costs of the shed used to keep the finds, 180 thousand euros a year – added Cozzi, close to retirement – With the request for indictment we also sent the investigating judge to return the finds in order to free up the sheds for the memory park, saving a little “.

The parallel

In the weighty act of the prosecutor’s office there is also room for a parallel: the tragedy of the Morandi bridge as well as that of the Val di Stava, July 19, 1985, 268 victims. There the reservoirs collapsed and the river of mud that came out was devastating. “At Stava they made a design mistake. Here we have execution errors – underline the prosecutor – Then it seems the same story: no one who keeps the structure under control and all who ignore the warning signs ». A work of man that gets worse year after year due to the immobility of those who should have inspected, intervened, checked. And that finally collapses. Ten people were sentenced for that disaster. For Morandi, at the moment, the possible defendants are 59, in addition to the two companies. The Benetton family and the political level remained out of the investigation.


June 25, 2021 (change June 25, 2021 | 11:30 pm)

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