Police seize 8.1 billion euros from ILVA steel plant owners
Baku, May 25 (AZERTAC). Police in the Italian southern city of Taranto on Friday seized 8.1 billion euros (10.4 billion U.S. dollars) worth of assets belonging to the Riva family, owner of troubled ILVA steel company, in a pollution probe against its Taranto plant.
The move came days after Milan investigators on Wednesday said they were probing the founders of the ILVA parent-company Riva Group, Emilio Riva and his brother Adriano, for alleged fraud and fake money transfers. They also seized another about 1.2 billion euros (about 1.5 billion U.S. dollars) assigned out of Italy by the Rivas.Last January, the Riva Group deputy chairman and family member Fabio Riva was arrested in London after two months on the run. Several other executives have been arrested as part of the investigations. They were suspected by prosecutors of criminal association, causing an environmental disaster and corruption aimed to hide the scale of the problem.
The Riva Group is the largest iron and steel producer in Italy, the fourth-largest in Europe and one of largest in the world. ILVA, a state-owned site since 1933, was bought by the group in 1995. It produced 8.5 million tons of steel in 2011, almost a third of the Italian total steel production.
The company has been at the center of an environmental scandal since July last year when local prosecutors ordered the partial closure of its Taranto plant due to serious health concerns.
A legal dispute was opened after a study showed that the area surrounding the plant suffered from a mortality excess up to 15 percent due to fumes and dust particles causing cancer and other diseases.
The Taranto plant, the biggest steel plant in Europe and one of the biggest in the world, is the core of ILVA production system and also feeds Italy`s engineering industries.
Over the past months, ILVA and the Italian government have been trying to keep the Taranto plant in operation while remediation measures necessary for ILVA to obtain environmental authorization (AIA) were being carried out.
The ILVA case sparked a national political and legal debate over whether the Taranto plant, located in a part of recession-plagued Italy with record high unemployment, should be shut down causing a halt of local output and threatening the jobs of some 12,000 workers.
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