MILAN — Pietro Marzotto, the former chairman and chief executive officer of the Marzotto textile group, and 10 others are facing charges of environmental disaster and manslaughter.
Following a trial that began in March last year after several adjournments, prosecutors in Paola last weekend requested the court in the southern Italian town sentence the defendants for the illness and deaths of about 15 former workers at the Marzotto textile manufacturing plant called Marlane, in Praia a Mare, a small town on the Mediterranean coast near Cosenza, Italy. According to legal sources, more than 100 former workers have died over the years in connection with the case. In the court papers obtained by WWD, there is a reference to 107 such individuals and, in some instances, the prosecutors requested acquittal because the statutes of limitations have expired or because there is no case to answer.
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The investigations that led to the trial began in 1999 and alleged that the workers died of cancer following the inhalation of toxic fumes at the plant, which was shut down in 2004 when manufacturing was outsourced to the Czech Republic. The investigation also alleged that chemical and toxic components were illegally disposed of at the plant and the surrounding territory.
Prosecutors are asking that Pietro Marzotto be sentenced to six years in prison. They asked that former Marzotto top executives Jean de Jaegher and Silvano Storer, who held the titles of president and chief executive officer, respectively, be sentenced to five years. A five-year sentence was also requested for Marzotto veteran and former Valentino Fashion Group chairman Antonio Favrin. A 10-year sentence was requested for a former mayor of Praia a Mare.
“My conscience is clear,” Pietro Marzotto told WWD on Tuesday. “I have not seen the papers deposited by the prosecutors and I have not been following the trial but I know that we bought Lanerossi [the company that originally had the Marlane plant] in September 1987 and that in November 1987 we replaced the dyes that Lanerossi was using with the ones we were using in Valdagno [near Vicenza, where Marzotto was founded].
“We have never had any [health] problems in Valdagno; actually I am told that it is one of the towns with the highest rate of longevity,” said Marzotto.
The entrepreneur explained that dyes with chrome were common in the Sixties but that his family’s company had abandoned them in favor of nontoxic ones long before the acquisition of Lanerossi. The Marlene plant was first set up in 1958.
Pietro Marzotto spearheaded the expansion of the family-owned textile group in the Eighties and Nineties and engineered the acquisition of men’s wear giant Hugo Boss in 1991. The entrepreneur was pushed out of the family’s company in 2003 by a new shareholders’ pact established by some of the Marzottos.
A legal source said that financial settlements have been discussed with the families of the victims over the years.
The next hearings are scheduled for Oct. 3 and 4.