Former Ilva, the judge denies the release of blast furnace 1: 'More investigation needed'

Ten months after the fire at one of the tube mills, blast furnace 1 at the former Ilva plant in Taranto, now Acciaierie d'Italia in extraordinary administration, remains under seizure without the right to use it. In a 14-page order filed on 12 February, the judge of the Court of Taranto, Mariano Robertiello, dismissed the application for release from seizure submitted by lawyer Angelo Loreto on behalf of Acciaierie, an application that was discussed at the hearing on 9 February. For the third time, the judiciary denied the release of blast furnace 1. The first time was last summer, the second just before Christmas, and the third on 12 February. In the first two cases, the 'no' came from the Public Prosecutor's Office, in the third from the preliminary investigation judge.

Gip Robertiello, referring to the preservation of the seizure and the investigative needs, wrote that 'the permanence of the real constraint is justified by the impossibility of achieving the same probative result by less afflictive means'. According to the magistrate, 'seizure' constitutes 'the only suitable means of preserving the integrity of the source of evidence'. It is, therefore, impracticable to carry out the residual investigations in the absence of the seizure, since the return of the property would entail interventions incompatible with the investigative needs, making the continuation of the investigation definitively impossible.

"The preservation of the seizure meets, therefore, the criteria of necessity, adequacy, proportionality and residuality, as in this case it does not have any sanctioning or anticipatory nature, but only conservative and instrumental to the exercise of the judicial function - writes the judge in his order -. It follows that, as things stand, the constraint retains full and current evidentiary functionality, as it is still strictly instrumental to the acquisition of decisive elements for the reconstruction of the causal dynamics of the event of 7 May 2025 and for the assessment of any liability'.

Blast furnace 1 was seized during the night of 7-8 May. It had been reactivated in October 2024. At the hearing on Monday, prosecutor Mariano Buccoliero argued that the continuation of the seizure was aimed at further investigations on the plant requested by the prosecutor's consultants. In his turn, the company's lawyer noted that the new investigations had already been prefigured in July, but were then discarded as unnecessary by the same consultants of the Public Prosecutor's Office.

The new investigations, argued AdI's lawyer at the hearing, could have been carried out months ago, but to carry them out now not only maintains the probative seizure, but is contrary to the guidelines of the Court of Cassation, for which this type of seizure must be carried out as quickly as possible. On this point, the gip, after observing that "the application for release from seizure is unfounded and must, therefore, be rejected", notes that "according to the consolidated orientation of the jurisprudence of legitimacy, the probatory seizure must be maintained whenever the property subjected to constraint retains a concrete, current and not merely potential ability to serve as a source of evidence". For the gip, it is 'sufficient that there remain non-marginal investigations whose execution requires the material preservation of the property in its current state'. And therefore, observes the gip, 'the verification of the persistence of the evidentiary requirements cannot be conducted in abstract or merely formal terms, but must be anchored to the concrete evolution of the investigation, to the nature of the investigations still to be carried out and to the degree of technical complexity of the context under investigation'.