The effects of the magistrates’ verdict on Ilva of Taranto: 8,000 jobs at risk and an industrial crisis that weighs 40 billion euros on the GDP.
The judges of court of Milan they probably would have done it sooner to write a sentence establishing that Ilva must close. Because in any case this will be the result they will obtain with their latest decision: the bankruptcy of what was once a steel giant and today is just a steel plant in its death throes. After 14 years of judicial seizures (and arrests of the legitimate owners of the company, the Riva family), of so-called “Save Ilva” decrees, of government commissionerships and attempts to find entrepreneurs who would take it over, Ilva has only one prospect before it, that is, to turn off the last blast furnace and fire the last 8,000 employees it still has in charge. When the Prosecutor’s Office of Taranto ordered the arrest of Emilio Riva and his sons Fabio and Nicola on charges ranging from criminal association to environmental disaster, as well as willful failure to take precautions in the workplace. Mario Monti was still at Palazzo Chigi.
Since then there have been many attempts to avoid the collapse of the steelworks. From Corrado Passera to Carlo Calenda, from Federica Guidi to Luigi Di Maio, from Giancarlo Giorgetti to Adolfo Urso: there are many ministers who have succeeded one another in the last fifteen years, but faced with the rigidity of the judiciary and the action of some political groups, every rescue attempt has been in vain. According to justice, Ilva is a poison factory and therefore, as the Milanese magistrates explain with the latest sentence, it must also turn off the last oven in the hot area, as the health – of the workers and the inhabitants of Taranto – comes first of all, before the right to workbefore freedom of enterprise, before national interests, which build development with steel.
The shutdown of the hot area and the short circuit between rules and courtrooms
In theory the judges are right, because no one has the right to make anyone else sick. But the problem is that Ilva’s plants comply with the regulations and are more advanced than those of other steel companies active in Europe. But this doesn’t matter to the robes. That over the years some blast furnaces have been turned off, that emissions have improved, that measures have been taken to guarantee the safety of workers and the health of the inhabitants of Taranto, the judges care zero. According to them, Ilva continues to be a threat despite respecting the rules. It is clear that the fate of a company that has been in the crosshairs of justice for 14 years, with continuous measures to stop production, can only be one: definitive stop. In fact, the steel melting plants are not powered, as the judiciary and some greens would like, with wind turbines. And with these assumptions there will never be any entrepreneur, Indian or Italian, who wants to take over a steelworks which risks being not only a debt but also a criminal risk. Who would ever venture into a purchase with the risk of being arrested for an environmental disaster and having their assets seized as has already happened to the Rivas?
The industrial price of the transition and the silence on jobs
No, Ilva is dead and with it some points of GDP also die, precisely 40 billionbecause without steel development cannot be supported and if one is forced to buy it elsewhere the costs rise. All this happens in the absolute indifference of the left that complains about the lack of growth and in the total silence of that union that demands higher wages, but which, faced with the follies of the judiciary and a political party, never has the courage to raise its voice. Indeed, for Maurizio Landini and comrades, the danger remains only fascism, not the loss of thousands of jobs.
I remember that in Saxony, Afd was successful not because the population suddenly converted to Nazism, but because in that Land in just one year hundreds of companies were closed, the most important of which were precisely due to the effects of Green deal. Because the environmental transition is beautiful, but if it happens on people’s skin it is a little less so.
