Dioxin firm contests ruling

Press, 27 September 1983, Page 10

Dioxin firm contests ruling

NZPA-Reuter Monza Hoffmann-Laßoche, the Swiss multinational whose plant in Seveso released a poisonous dioxin cloud, is contesting an Italian Court verdict that the ecological disaster in 1976 could have been avoided.

Although the parent company was not directly on trial, senior executives from its Basle headquarters were in Court as sentence was pronounced and promptly issued a statement saying that the five defendants would appeal. Hoffmann-Laßoche, one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical groups, owng’the

Swiss firm, Givaudan, which in turn owns the Icmesa plant in Seveso that exploded in a cloud of dioxin on July 10, 1976. A statement by Givaudan and Hoffman-Laßoche attacked the Court decision to convict four of the defendants of wilfully omitting to take safety precautions before the explosion.

The two companies agreed that the five-month trial had been conducted correctly. “So they regret all the more that the Court largely complied with the prosecution assertion that the Seveso accident was forseeable,” the statement

Judge Cesare di Nunzio, announcing the verdict, said that the four were guilty of wilful omission, an offence which implied that they could have prevented the accident.

Throughout the trial defence lawyers opposed the allegation. They said that in 1976 scientists did not know how the chemicals for making trichlorophenol would behave if left unattended in the reactor.

They cited a theory developed only two years ago by an American scientist which says that, residual heat in the factor walls had

caused a chain reaction even though workmen had switched off the mixing process.

Givaudan and Laßoche, which have so far paid about ?120 million compen-. sation to victims of the’ dioxin fallout, said that the prosecution had not proven its case of wilful omission and the convictions were “inappropriate.” Industry sources said that the pharmaceutical group was particularly anxious to contest the convictions of wilful omission since they could establish a costly precedent for any future chemical accident.