06.08.2015
Exploitation, despoliation, corruption
Toby Abse looks at the sorry story of the Riva family
The decision of the Puglian magistrates on July 23 to put 44 politicians, officials and two capitalists - Fabio and Nicola Riva - on trial for crimes connected with the ILVA steelworks at Taranto is a major challenge to the Italian establishment, which has done its utmost to obstruct their painstaking and persistent investigations.
Whilst no government ministers face charges, it needs to be stressed that successive Italian governments - under Silvio Berlusconi, Mario Monti, Enrico Letta and Matteo Renzi - have sought to obstruct every attempt by local magistrates to close the steel plant (as well as key installations on the site, such as the blast furnace) on safety grounds, no less than nine times: generally they have used decree law rushed through parliament at breakneck speed to rapidly override the slower-moving conventional legal process based on court orders. Governments have repeatedly claimed that the plant is of overwhelming national strategic importance to the Italian economy and must be kept open regardless of breaches of environmental or safety legislation, often claiming that modifications can be made whilst the plant is still running.
The latest decree law was passed by the Chamber of Deputies on July 23 - whether the coincidence of timing with the announcement of the decision to put the defendants in the dock was accidental is a mystery and will doubtless remain one - by 355 votes to 188, with one abstention. The panicky and cynical attitude of the government is illustrated by the way the relevant articles were rapidly inserted into a decree on bankruptcies, which had no obvious connection with the ILVA plant.
The outcome of some recent Italian cases concerning deaths from asbestos-related diseases show the great difficulty in securing the conviction of industrialists who knowingly consign their workforces to an early grave.1 The most recent is the case of Eternit Italia, whose former owner, Stephan Schmidheiny, was accused of being responsible for the death of 258 people - some of them workers, some of them their relatives and others ordinary citizens in the four towns where the firm has factories. But the ILVA trial scheduled for October 20 will not only expose a tangled web of corruption and intimidation, but also provide a clear demonstration of how the logic of capital - the pursuit of the maximum profit regardless of any consequences - treats workers’ health and safety and massive long-term damage to the environment: of no importance whatsoever. Any laws that nominally protect either workers or the integrity of land, air and sea are regarded as inconvenient obstacles, to be overcome by any means necessary. Whilst such attitudes are, of course, par for the course in the third world - the Union Carbide factory at Bhopal in India, BP in Mexico or various oil companies in the Niger Delta, to give just three prominent examples - such behaviour, whilst characteristic of earlier phases of industrialisation, has been rather rarer in western Europe since 1945.
The premature deaths and incurable illnesses being investigated in this case - the magistrates allege 368 deaths provoked by the steel works in one way or another, with 174 victims killed by pollution in 2005-12 - are not an incident in some small factory, comparable to the tragic death in an explosion of seven workers in Bruscella Fireworks in Modugno on July 24, which received massive attention in the Italian media recently2. The ILVA plant is not just by far the biggest Italian steel works, but is now the largest functioning in the whole of western Europe. Whilst this increased status obviously reflects the decline of the steel industry elsewhere, the factory at Taranto always stood out as a massive undertaking. It was one of the major components of the Italian government’s ill-fated attempt to modernise not just the region of Puglia, but the south in general, through the construction of new factories. These came to be known as ‘cathedrals in the desert’, since they failed to have the more generalised impact on southern Italian regions’ societies and economies that their planners had hoped for - even if some have argued that such workplaces did to some extent increase class-consciousness amongst their own workers, weakening the hold of organised crime groups prominent in such regions.3
It would be wrong to deny that there were always serious, but poorly understood, and not widely recognised, problems relating to the environment and to workers’ health and safety throughout the decades during which ILVA was under state control. However, there does seem to have been a further deterioration in the situation over the last 20 years, after privatisation, not just because of the failure of the new owners - the Riva family - to replace ageing plant, but also because of their utterly callous and cynical attitude to the ILVA workers and the citizens of Taranto in general. The privatisation of ILVA was part of the rapid dismantling in the early 1990s of the former state holding company, IRI, which was founded by the fascists in 1933 in the aftermath of the great depression of 1929 and maintained - and indeed expanded - by the Christian Democrat-led governments of the cold war era.
This somewhat belated turn to neoliberalism was in marked contrast to the 1980s, which was characterised by the corrupt and clientelistic Keynesianism of Bettino Craxi. That was the period in which Italy’s national debt as a percentage of gross national product ballooned to the point that has now left it second only to Greece within the EU.4 But it ended with the so-called ‘First Republic’ and was associated with Italy’s ignominious exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System in September 1992 - although it was probably hastened by the liquidation of the Partito Comunista Italiano in 1991.5
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The Riva family have had some connection with the steel industry for more than 60 years. Riva Acciaio (Riva Steel) was founded in 1954 as an iron scrap business and it would be fair to say that the entire dynasty have always had the narrow, grasping mentality of dodgy scrap-metal dealers rather than the genuine vision of a state steel boss like Oscar Sinigaglia.
In 1957 the first Riva mini-mill was built near Varese in Lombardy. In the 1950s and 1960s Riva expanded by acquiring several small steel producers in northern Italy and Spain - something which is probably worth stressing, since their contempt for the people of Taranto owes something to a northern colonialist mentality, which sees the southerners as inferior human beings.6 In the 1980s they made acquisitions in Belgium and France, as well as taking over the previously state-owned steel works, Acciaierie di Cornegliano, in Italy. In 1991 their ruthless asset-stripping of state property was demonstrated by the way they acquired two mini-mills in the former German Democratic Republic. Chancellor Helmut Kohl had engaged in a rapid-fire sale of the formerly nationalised East German industry - the obvious precedent for the July 2015 diktat imposed on Greece. In 1995 Riva Acciaio sealed its rise from mere scrap-metal dealers by taking over ILVA in Taranto, becoming one of the main European steel companies.
Although it was the investigating magistrate, Patrizia Todisco, who from July 2012 onwards made the first serious all-out assault on the Rivas, to say that they had form in relation to criminal proceedings about their Italian steel plants would be an understatement. The immensely wealthy Rivas were always in a position to hire the best lawyers and engage in long-drawn-out appeals, whilst not all magistrates had the commitment and competence later displayed by Todisco and her current colleagues. In 2001 the Tribunal of Taranto declared Emilio Riva, his son, Claudio, and other ILVA managers guilty of attempted illegal coercion of ILVA employees, whom they had demoted in 1998. This verdict was confirmed by the Cassazione (Supreme Court) in 2006. In February 2007 Emilio Riva was sentenced to three years in prison and Claudio to 18 months for neglect of work safety procedures and violation of anti-pollution regulations in the management of the Taranto coke plant. In 2006 Emilio Riva and his sons, Fabio, Arturo and Claudio, were sentenced to one and four months in prison (commuted) for environmental pollution caused by the ILVA plants.
In January 2009, however, the court of appeal declared all cases related to pollution derived from the coke plant to have been timed out under the statute of limitations, while remitting to the public prosecutor all matters related to the blast furnace, due to judicial error (in any even these blast furnace-related offences would also have been timed out in 2010). Eventually Emilio’s son, Nicola, and other plant managers were acquitted on appeal due to the statute of limitations.
Corrupt web
Todisco acted with greater determination than her predecessors. She pointed to the premature deaths and disease the Rivas had spread to the whole city, including a number of children who died long before reaching adulthood - fumes ruined the air and soil and even poisoned the fish in the surrounding sea. The old patriarch, Emilio, was placed under house arrest in July 2012 and the Taranto plant was partially closed by the prosecutors. Todisco asked the company to pay €3 billion to clear up the pollution around the plant and subsequently the court made an order for the sequestration of €8 billion. This was the sum the Riva family ought to have spent on environmental improvements to the steel works over the years. In December 2012 the prosecutors issued a European arrest warrant for Riva’s eldest son, Fabio, who had fled to London, only finally returning in June 2015. His brother, Nicola, also faced environmental charges and was placed under house arrest. Emilio Riva died in April 2015, aged 87, never facing justice for his decades as a ruthless exploiter of workers and destroyer of the environment.
As I have indicated earlier, Fabio and Nicola Riva are not the only figures who will be in the dock this autumn. Bruno Ferrante, the former prefect of Milan and the government-appointed director of the Taranto steel works for a short period after the Rivas’ downfall in 2012, is also being accused of covering up and perpetuating their wrongdoing. Given the willingness of successive governments to pass decree laws to protect the Rivas’ empire over the last few years, it may be that the prefect is taking the blame for decisions made at a higher level. Gianni Florido, the former president of Taranto province, is also accused of putting pressure on leading figures in the environmental agency to grant permission for the dumping of dangerous waste. Ippazio Stefano, the mayor of Taranto, is accused of failing to take the necessary measures to protect the citizens of Taranto despite being aware of both the harmful emissions of the factory and their consequences for the health of the inhabitants. It could, of course, be argued that these local politicians may have been genuinely concerned to preserve the jobs provided by the steel works, which is Taranto’s main employer7; and it remains to be seen whether any of the Rivas’ immense wealth came their way.
However, the most astonishing political scandal concerns no less than Nichi Vendola, the leader of the soft-left Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà and former president of Puglia (2005-2015), who is alleged to have exerted pressure on Giorgio Assennato, the director-general of the environmental agency, ARPA Puglia. Two members of Vendola’s regional cabinet are also facing charges relating to the scandal. Vendola vehemently denies all wrongdoing, giving indignant interviews to a wide variety of newspapers and pointing the finger at others he alleges to have been in the pay of the Rivas, such as the former PD leader, Pierluigi Bersani, but some of the wiretaps and witness statements appear to put him in a bad light.
Regardless of whether Vendola has actually broken the criminal law, his conduct in relation to the Rivas, some of the worst enemies of the environment amongst allegedly legitimate businessmen, will severely damage the credibility of SEL, whose commitment to ecology is central to its programme and incorporated in its very name l
Notes
1. In this instance the constitutional court decided in July that the trial was an attempt to try a man twice for the same offence under a different law.
2. The death rate in Italian fireworks factories seems to have increased, as more or less legitimate firms have reduced the level of their safety precautions in response to cut-throat competition from unlicensed manufacturers. In the case of Bruscella Fireworks we are clearly talking about the logic of capital rather than the malevolence of individual capitalists: the owners, the Bruscella brothers, were badly burnt in this explosion and their brother-in-law was amongst the dead, whilst their grandmother was amongst the nine dead in an earlier explosion in the same factory in 1959. However, the fact that the dead workers included two Indians and an Albanian suggest that, even in a relatively poor region like Puglia, Italian workers are reluctant to take on such dangerous employment.
3. Oscar Sinigaglia was the main architect of Italy’s modern steel industry under the aegis of IRI during the 1950s. There was also considerable state investment in modern works at Cornegliano, Piombino and Bagnoli, some of which had a prior tradition as steel towns. The entire Italian steel industry is now crisis-ridden - the works in the Tuscan town of Piombino has only narrowly escaped total closure.
4. It rose from 72% to 93% of GNP during Craxi’s premiership (1983-87).
5. For a much more detailed account of these developments, see my ‘Italy’s long road to austerity and the paradoxes of communism’ in Bernard H Moss (ed) Monetary union in crisis: the European Union as a neoliberal construction London 2005, pp249-65.
6. As Ruggiero Ranieri put it in an obituary of Emilio Riva, “They tried to cut corners, bend the rules. The family did not build a relationship with the community and there is a great deal of hostility towards them.”
7. In the last few years the city has seen rival demonstrations for and against the closure of the steel works, with some unions opposing the closure. It is hard to judge whether this is the genuine desperation of men who prefer a shortened life in work, followed by ill health and early death, to immediate and long-term unemployment; or whether it is largely the product of the Rivas and their underlings dispensing large sums in cash to corrupt union officials. In the case of the coal-fired power station, Tirreno Power in the Ligurian city of Savona, there is more direct evidence of corrupt union officials secretly coordinating strike action with their bosses to obstruct environmentalists. So, given the Rivas’ general conduct, the latter explanation would be plausible, but remains unproven.