26 oktober 2025
Op 17 april 2025 werd de Zwitserse zakenman Stephan Schmidheiny door het Hof van Beroep van Turijn veroordeeld tot 9 jaar en 6 maanden gevangenisstraf in het Eternit "bis"-proces, in verband met asbestgerelateerde sterfgevallen in Italië. In eerste aanleg werd hij veroordeeld tot 12 jaar gevangenisstraf.
Dit is de voortzetting, zo niet het einde, van een langdurige procedure die door het parket van Turijn is gestart tegen de historische internationale leiders van Eternit Italië, waaronder Stephan Schmidheiny, evenals de Belg Louis Cartier de Marchienne, die in 2012 werd veroordeeld voor de dood van talrijke asbestslachtoffers op verschillende locaties van het bedrijf in Italië. De veroordeling was bevestigd in beroepsprocedure, maar de Belgische baron was intussen overleden.
Het werd vervolgens vernietigd door het Hof van Cassatie, voornamelijk om redenen van verjaring en procedure. Andere vervolgingen werden vervolgens opnieuw gestart, op gecorrigeerde gronden, en dat hebben ze in april 2025 tot deze veroordeling van de Zwitserse zakenman geleid. Het duurde vervolgens zes maanden om het volledige oordeel te krijgen (600 pagina's).
Hieronder publiceren we het artikel van de Italiaanse journaliste Silvana Mossano, die een samenvatting geeft (in het Engels).
Report by Silvana MOSSANO
The Turin Court of Appeal’s verdict is over 600 pages long: it explains the reasons why it sentenced Stephan Schmidheiny to nine and a half years– guilty of manslaughter for the death of the people of Casale who died of mesothelioma. Half the verdict consists of the files with a detailed study of each individual case: every life cut short by asbestos, suffocated by the puvri, as it is called in local dialect. When you say puvri, everyone here understands.
In its verdict, the Court states that it was not possible to establish in all cases whether the disease originated from the criminal conduct of the defendant. Why?
In summary, in deciding which deaths (listed in the indictment) were, in the Court’s opinion, attributable to Schmidheiny’s conduct which he was convicted him and which were not, in the Court’s opinion, attributable to Schmidheiny (for which it acquitted him),ì. Cases were sorted one by one using the following criteria:
* * *
In my analysis I will consider the crucial points that have sparked widespread debate and drastic opposition in the Eternit Bis trial. It began as a single case, brought by the Turin Public Prosecutor with an indictment of wilful (i.e., voluntary) murder for hundreds of mesothelioma deaths ascribed to Swiss entrepreneur Stephan Schmidheiny. For decades, his family (and he himself) owned and managed Eternit, one of the world’s largest industries engaged in the extraction and production of asbestos products, in Italy and several other countries.
I shall carry out this analysis by following the reasoning of the Turin judges who responded to the issues raised both the prosecution and the defence in their appeals against the first-instance judgement handed down by the Court of Assizes of Novara on 7 June 2023. I will do so by quoting excerpts from the verdict by the Court of Appeal of Assizes (14 October – the verdict was read on 14 April 2025).
These are the points to be examined in depth:
DUTY OF CARE
To simplify: was it Stephan Schmidheiny who decided whether, what and how big an investment was required to keep the inside and outside of the working environment safe? Did he order managers how to behave, how to act and what to say in their dealings with workers, trade unions, politicians and journalists? In essence: was he the head of Eternit?
The Court of Appeal wrote that several pieces of evidence ‘converge in indicating a top-down organisational model headed by the current defendant, who not only chose to continue production despite being aware of the dangerous nature of the substance being handled, but also continuously interfered in the management of the Italian plants, including the Casale plant, in order to ensure that the corporate policies decided at central level were implemented at local level, with particular reference to the management of the risk of exposure to asbestos‘.
In other words, yes, Stephan Schmidheiny was the boss who decided and ordered what was to be done.
Among the arguments proving his direct management, the Turin judges referred to:
PERSONAL OR SUBJECTIVE ASPECT
The question is: was the defendant’s conduct intentional or negligent?
In other words, is he guilty of voluntary manslaughter (as claimed by the prosecution, which based its main ground for appealing the first instance judgment on this complaint) or negligent manslaughter?
The Court of Assizes of Novara had reclassified the offence from intentional to negligent. This was also confirmed on appeal.
What does the Court of Turin write in this regard in response to the prosecution’s appeal?
“The public prosecutor’s appeal, which complains about the erroneous reclassification of the disputed facts from aggravated intentional homicide to aggravated negligent homicide, cannot be upheld”.
Why? The Court writes: ‘The assessment of the distance between the conduct [of the defendant, ed.] and the standard (in other words: Schmidheiny’s actions compared to what, in the opinion of the prosecution, he should have done, being perfectly aware of the carcinogenicity of asbestos, my note) cannot fail to take into account the regulations in force at the time of the management of the company by the defendant, in which the production of asbestos was permitted and lawful [the law prohibiting asbestos dates back to 1992, my note] and, furthermore, there were no regulatory limits on the use of asbestos‘. The Court continues: “There was no total inertia [on the part of Schmidheiny, my note]: yes, he was aware ”of the dangers of using asbestos, but there was not yet an attitude such as to consider that the defendant would not have refrained from unlawful conduct even if he had been aware of the certain occurrence of the event‘. According to the prosecutors, Schmidheiny was aware of the serious health risks, and should have suspended the activity. The Turin judges, on the other hand, agree with their colleagues in Novara, considering “conscious negligence [is] valid, downgrading the charge of intentional homicide”.
Let me list further excerpts on the subjective element.
“It must be considered,” writes the Court, ‘that, taking into account the scientific knowledge and the actual conditions in which the Casale plant operated, the defendant realised that the management and maintenance of the plant could cause numerous deaths, due to and facilitated by the continuous and massive exposure of workers to asbestos dust and that, despite foreseeing such serious events, he did not do everything in his power to prevent them, underestimating the extent of the danger, factors which allow us to consider the aggravating circumstance of culpable negligence with foresight to be established“. In other words, the defendant acted” supported by the subjective element of conscious negligence (…). He could certainly have avoided or reduced the events that occurred by taking greater precautions and, where necessary, by avoiding the use of asbestos, thus preventing the events that occurred‘.
So what? According to the Court of Turin, the Swiss entrepreneur knew (that asbestos is carcinogenic), did not do what he could have done to prevent the indiscriminate spread of harmful fibres (by adopting technologies or discontinuing the use of asbestos), but, according to the judges, did not have the specific intention to kill. Therefore: manslaughter aggravated by conscious negligence and not intentional.
POLLUTION FROM THE FACTORY AND ALTERNATIVE SOURCES
The defence was unable to deny the evidence, namely
While unable to deny this evidence – which emerged from many testimonies, as well as numerous inspection and expert reports – the defence tried to shift the focus to the so-called “alternative sources” of dust in the city of Casale and its surroundings, also known as “improper uses”.
We are referring to production waste that was used for a long time to patch or underlay roads and squares, and the even more dangerous “dust”, used to insulate attics and level sports fields (football, bocce, parish halls, etc.), courtyards, farmyards and churchyards.
Why is dust said to be “even more dangerous”? Because it was not just the more generic puvri, but scraps from the manufacture of pipes, where crocidolite or blue asbestos was used, which was much worse in its effects than the already dangerous chrysotile or white asbestos used to make sheets (corrugated).
For many years, various types of production waste left the factory and were widely used in the above-mentioned applications. The defence insisted that Schmidheiny had given instructions to prohibit the distribution of powder, although there is no evidence that this order (which arose from full awareness of the carcinogenicity of crocidolite, of which, however, the population or local authorities were never informed) was enforced.
In any case, the defence’s argument is that the waste left the factory before Stephan Schmidheiny took over its management (so he had nothing to do with it) and that, according to Professor Andrea D’Anna’s expert opinion, it caused more pollution than the factory (which, among other things, was equipped with large fans without filters), the former warehouses, the former Piemontese area, the landfill on the Po River, road transport, and the workers’ overalls taken home impregnated with dust because the factory did not have an internal laundry.
This stubborn “minimisation of the value of emissions from the Eternit factory” by Prof D’Anna did not convince the Court of Assizes of Novara, nor the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Turin, which, on the contrary, agreed with “the assessment made by the judges of first instance”; the latter had already condemned the “armchair reconstruction carried out by the defence consultant (Prof. D’Anna), who [for his analysis] referred to generic and abstract territorial data” (Google Maps, my comment). The appeal judges now rejected “the defence consultant’s overestimation of the influence of alternative factors”. And again: ‘There is also decisive, concrete and convincing evidence regarding the unreliability of the conclusions derived from the abstract calculations made by the defence consultant, the results of which lead to the conclusion that the impact of alternative sources was maximum and that of production activity was decidedly minimal, since, following the remediation of the Eternit factory in 2006, the right bank of the Po River in 2000 and 2001, and the Eternit warehouse area, all subsequent environmental monitoring conducted by Arpa Piemonte since 2007 have not revealed any particular critical issues and the concentration of fibres in the atmosphere has decreased since the closure of the factory and then decreased further with the remediation phases, and a clear improvement was found by Arpa after 2007 when not all improper sources such as beaten surfaces, roofing and attics had yet been remediated‘. In other words, after the factory closed in 1986 and the subsequent remediation work was carried out (on the factory itself and other relevant industrial sites), asbestos pollution had decreased, even though no work had yet been done on the attics and floors.
At the same time, shifting its attention to the active production site, the Court of Appeal of Assizes in Turin emphasised that “the conditions of asbestos dispersion did not only affect the inside, but also significantly affected the exterior”. It refers to “testimonies, together with the findings of the various competent bodies” which “unequivocally attest to the existence of severe environmental pollution, given the quantity and quality of the material processed, as well as the uninterrupted processing of the same” (reference is made to a number of expert reports, numerous inspections and related prescriptions by the inspection bodies, and the pressing and repeated requests for compliance by the works council).
However, to establish the link between the pollution produced by the plant and the onset of the disease (especially in “environmental victims”), the Turin Court focused on the distances from the production site. Considering the epidemiological studies carried out in the Casale area – the expert witnesses of Public Prosecution, Drs Magnani and Mirabelli had indicated that exposure to asbestos was significant even at a distance of 10 kilometres; the Court of Assizes of Novara, on the other hand, had focused on a maximum of 5 kilometres. The judges of the Court of Appeal of Assizes, in turn, while attributing “significant value” to those studies, reduced the distance to 2 kilometres, considering the defence expert, Professor Gary Marsh’s opinion to be convincing. The US expert had presented international studies according to which there were “no significant associations between mesothelioma and distances greater than 2 kilometres from an asbestos cement plant”. This is why, in addition to the cases Schmidheiny had already been acquitted for by the Court of Assizes, others were eliminated by the court of Appeal of Assizes: ‘ In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the causal impact of emissions from production activities on residences exceeding a distance of 2,000 metres cannot be considered proven beyond reasonable doubt, it being understood that alternative sources existing within that area must be considered concurrent‘.
CAUSAL LINK
Which cases, named in the indictment, were victims, according to the Court of Appeal, of the criminal conduct attributed to the Swiss businessman?
Legally, this is the most sensitive and controversial aspect.
What is the causal link?
It is what causes a harmful event (in this case, mesothelioma-related illnesses and deaths) to be linked to a specific conduct (in this case, that of the defendant Schmidheiny, head manager of the asbestos factory): it is a matter of establishing, beyond reasonable doubt, whether the actions committed or omissions resulted in the explosion of mesothelioma victims.
In order to establish causality, it is necessary to examine the so-called “covering law”, i.e. the scientific laws that attest to the probability of a certain event occurring as a result of a certain conduct.
The Court verified the covering law and stated that the event (illness-death) was the consequence of the action (or omission) on the part of the defendant and that, without that action/omission, the victims would not have fallen ill and died.
The issue of science entering the courts is a thorny one, and not only in the Eternit Bis trial.
The Court of Cassation has already dealt with it, and the Turin Court of Appeal has scrupulously adhered to the criteria set out in a 2018 ruling, in the chapter entitled “The judge, the parties and expert knowledge”.
What does the Court of Cassation say? “The judge is precluded from creating the scientific law necessary for the assessment; since he is the bearer of ‘legitimate ignorance” with regards to scientific knowledge, it is a matter of assessing the scientific authority of the expert who transfers his/her knowledge of science to the trial; but also of understanding, especially in the most problematic cases, whether the statements that are proposed are commonly accepted in the scientific community‘. Not only that, but the Court of Cassation also provided guidance on the credibility of consultants called to court: “”, it writes, “The identity, undisputed authority and independence of the person conducting the research, and the purposes for which they are acting are of the utmost importance”.
In essence, judges are not scientists, and it would be inappropriate on their part to decide which scientific law is the most fitting to explain certain events. In this case what should judges do? They must first consult experts who can explain the scientific laws and then decide based on the authority and maximum consensus of the scientific community.
Therefore, to find a defendant guilty, it is essential that “that the [identified] covering law is recognised by the scientific community as the most accredited, beyond reasonable doubt. This does not require the exclusion of any opposing or divergent theories but only requires demonstration of the marginality of the other theories in circulation”.
Having stated this rigorous premise, the Turin judges agreed with Professor Irma Dianzani’s statement that “the process of multistage carcinogenesis (i.e. the development of mesothelioma through various stages over time, ed.) is that currently established by the scientific community and reported in the most widely consulted medical textbooks”.
Furthermore, they agreed with the principle that “all doses matter”, which ‘is an expression of the dose-response relationship, where dose means cumulative exposure including intensity and duration. The report by the public prosecutor’s expert witnesses – Prof. (Corrado) Magnani and Dr (Dario) Mirabelli – gives a detailed account of the studies on which this approach is based, concluding that asbestos, as a complete carcinogen, affects both the initiation phase (i.e. the moment when the first cell becomes diseased) and the promotion phase of the tumour (i.e. the multiplication of malignant cells until the formation of the tumour, which is autonomous in its growth but still asymptomatic, ed.) “.Prof. Dianzani was quoted saying: ”The incidence of tumours due to exposure increases both with the duration [of exposure] and with the increase in its intensity, and there is neither a threshold of exposure below which there is no effect nor a limit beyond which further increases in exposure have no effect‘.
What does this mean in these cases? It means that the carcinogenic process may have begun in an individual even before Schmidheiny’s period of management (due to asbestos exposure in the years prior to 1976), but the additional doses inhaled during the decade in which he was head of Eternit nevertheless increased the progression of the lesion.
Not only that. “Closely related to the principle that ‘all doses count’ is the principle of the anticipation ì, which describes the actual causal impact of subsequent exposures, identified, on the basis of shared studies, in the acceleration of the disease and, consequently, in the anticipation of death”. This means that even if the mutation of healthy cells into cancerous cells had already begun in the body, continued exposure to asbestos accelerates the development of mesothelioma, thus bringing forward death, which would otherwise have occurred years later.
The judges also referred to an excerpt from a document published in 2020 by the Italian Epidemiology Association, according to which “increased cumulative exposure to asbestos leads to an increased risk of cancer”.
However, the defence consultants have always objected that these statements are based on epidemiology, which is a statistical science that, in their opinion, cannot be applied to individuals.
The public prosecutor’s consultants, on the other hand, replied that it is precisely epidemiological science that forms the basis of, for example, pharmacological research, and that the demonstration of the effectiveness of therapies – studied, tested and ultimately used for individuals – starts precisely from epidemiological studies.
In the debate on the effectiveness of epidemiology, biological evidence was lacking, but this was obtained “in a very recent laboratory study [Faradhman study], illustrated by Prof. Magnani. The results were published in 2023 and were therefore not yet available when the Eternit Bis first instance trial took place”.
This is a study carried out on laboratory mice. ‘The mice were ‘engineered’ (i.e. their DNA was modified for research purposes, ed.) so that they were all destined to die of mesothelioma; then they were divided into two groups and the mice in one of the two groups were injected with asbestos into the pleura [Prof. Magnani explained that the effect of the injection is identical to that of inhalation]’.
What did the researchers observe? That “all the mice in the first and second groups died of mesothelioma, but the mice in the group treated with asbestos injections died earlier than the mice in the second group”.
Then, “the researchers also performed autopsies on the mice, finding that [in those treated with the additional dose of asbestos] the disease was more widespread both in the lungs and on the chest wall, which is where mesothelioma starts”.
Therefore, “the results of Faradhman’s study provide evidence of a biological phenomenon that fully corresponds to the data processed on the basis of epidemiological observation”, i.e. additional doses of asbestos exposure matter and cause the disease to develop earlier. Prof. Magnani, in response to a specific question from the Court, replied without hesitation: “I would say that it is a universal law; in scientific terms, it is simply a law”: in the event of an increase in the intensity and/or duration of exposure, the disease inevitably accelerates in individuals destined to develop mesothelioma.
CONCLUSIONS
The conclusions of the Court of Appeal are clear and decisive, setting out the “covering law recognised by the scientific community as most accredited”, which it then examined on a case-by-case basis and decided, for each case, whether the responsibility for their deaths could be attributed to the defendant.
These are as follows:
FINAL VERDICT
Therefore, the Court of Appeal found Stephan Schmidheiny guilty of aggravated manslaughter and considered him guilty for 91 victims, compared to the initial 392 cases listed in the indictment, which were reduced as a result of statutes of limitations and acquittals. Hence the consequent mathematical reduction of the sentence from 12 years’ imprisonment (in the first instance) to 9 and a half years’ imprisonment (in the second instance).
The statute of limitations: between the Novara ruling of 7 June 2023 and the appeal ruling handed down on 17 April this year, 19 cases had reached the statute of limitations, to which the Turin Court added another 8 which, according to its calculations, had already reached the statute of limitations before June 2023.
The acquittals: the Court of Novara (for the reasons explained above, filtered by the criteria indicated in the Conclusions paragraph) had already acquitted Schmidheiny in relation to 46 cases of death; the Court of Appeal added the acquittal for another 29 cases, narrowing the grid from 10 kilometres away from the plant (“despite having significant value, given the statistical studies conducted in the Casale Monferrato area”).