Ilva Saga Prolongs as ArcelorMittal Restarts Talks
Italian Prime Minister Mr Giuseppe Conte, after a four hour long meeting with ArcelorMittal Chairman and Chief Executive Mr LN Mittal and Group CFO and CEO of ArcelorMittal Europe in Rome o Friday, said that “Mittals are available to start immediate talks to decide on a new shared future for Ilva. The aim is to get to a new industrial plan, with new production solutions and new ecological technologies allowing the highest effort in cleaning up the environment. Legal immunity was not discussed at the meeting but opened up the possibility that the state could play a direct role in Ilva, given its importance for the wider Italian economy.”
To facilitate the talks, the government will ask for the postponement of a court hearing scheduled for November 27 over an urgent appeal filed by Rome to try to stop ArcelorMittal’s planned decision to shut down Ilva. Mr Conte said “We’re ready to allow this postponement under the condition that ArcelorMittal agrees to keep plant working and production flowing during talks.”
Milan Prosecutors in a filing in the civil suit said “As The lifting of a penal shield protecting managers from legal action over an environmental clean up at the huge ex-ILVA Taranto steelworks is just a pretext for ArcelorMittal's pull out. The real reason why ArcelorMittal decided to pull out of a deal to take over the Italian steel group is the business crisis and their consequent desire to disinvest.”
Testimony from an unidentified ArcelorMittal manager published in the suit on Friday said the foreign managers claimed that for the current rate of the works, that is an output of six million tonnes of steel, the quality of raw materials was too high, and we needed to use material of lower quality to bring the costs down. The CEO of ArcelorMittal Italia Mr Lucia Morselli officially declared in a meeting in early November with the directors and the executives" to stop booking orders and selling to the customers.
In the meantime, in the Arcelor Mittal steel plant in Taranto, an inspection is underway, delegated by the prosecutor's office, of the NOA Carabinieri of Rome, of the Nucleus on safety at work and of the provincial command in the context of the investigations started after the statement by the Ilva commissioners in As. The verifications concern the reclamation operations in the plant, the general situation of the factory, the maintenance activities carried out so far and the safety on the job.
Source : Strategic Research Institute