VERBANIA. The preliminary hearing for the Mottarone accident, in which 14 people died three and a half years ago in 2021, will have to be held all over again. Today, during the hearing, the preliminary hearing judge Rosa Maria Fornelli did not revoke her order and returned the file to the prosecutor Olimpia Bossi and the prosecutor Laura Carrera.
Before the summer, the judge’s decision on the Verbania Prosecutor’s Office‘s request for the defendants to be sent to trial was expected.
The judge also rejected the objections raised by the defense. At this point, the proceedings for the accident in the Stresa cableway system, which occurred on 23 May 2021, should go back to the stage of closing the investigation and making a new request for indictmentwith the setting of a second preliminary hearing.
The first preliminary hearing opened on January 17: ten months later, after two hours in chambers, today Judge Fornelli decided to return the documents to the prosecutor’s office. An expected regression in the trial, after one had taken place in the previous court hearings in Verbania clash over the formulation of the crime hypotheseswith the prosecutors who had opposed the request made by the preliminary hearing judge to modify the charges by excluding the aggravating circumstances of accident prevention and the existence of intentional crimes.
On 18 June, the Verbania prosecutor’s office had requested seven indictments: for Leitner, "we are able to show the group's involvement within the tragedy" – Information”>Luigi Nerini, the owner of the company that managed the Stresa ski lift, for the then service manager Gabriele Tadini, for the operations director Enrico Perocchio, for Martin Leitner, vice-president of Leitner, for Peter Rabanser, manager of the customer service, and for the two companies Ferrovie del Mottarone and Leitner.
He had instead made a request for acquittal against the chairman of Leitner’s board of directors, Anton Seeber due to lack of elements, as he does not have corporate powers over the cableways.
A month later, on 23 July, instead of deciding on the requests formulated by the prosecutor’s office, the preliminary hearing judge asked the prosecutors to modify the charges, a request which, in the hearing on 12 September, the prosecutor’s office opposed, maintaining that the judge of the preliminary hearing does not have “uncontested dominion” over the “legal qualification of the facts (…) which leads to a reduction of the findings” and does not have such powers “as to lead to situations in which the public prosecutor, at the in order to avoid the return of the documents and the regression of the proceedings, he is, in fact, forced to overturn the accusatory system”.
We have therefore reached today and a turning point that will significantly extend the time.
“We are in a new, unexplored phase: we have a regression of the proceedings, as if the preliminary hearing were no longer there, but a request for indictment on charges, which have been the subject of criticism, which remains on table. We will see what the prosecutor’s office will do”, said the lawyer Andrea Da Prato, defender of the operations manager Enrico Perocchio, at the end of today’s preliminary hearing in which the preliminary hearing judge returned the file to the prosecutor’s office, after the prosecutors in the last hearing had not accepted the request to reformulate the hypotheses of crime.
Da Prato explained that the preliminary hearing judge Rosa Maria Fornelli rejected two exceptions: that “of separating some charges, leaving them to the jurisdiction of this judge, and that of a defense that claimed the nullity of the request for indictment”.
The lawyer Marcello Perillo, defender of Gabriele Tadini, the service manager of the Mottarone cableway system, comments: “The prosecutor, in his brief, outlined commendable technical aspects: what he says is not wrong, but currently the rule is like this and I am convinced that the judge made the right decision today. We are convinced that the accident aspect of work does not exist. The prosecutor, however, is convinced so. It’s what’s called adversarial proceedings, the emblem of a fair trial: the parties do their job and then a judge decides what the best solution is.”