“It emerged that the bridge had an original design defect and that it was at risk of collapse. I asked if there was someone who certified safety and Riccardo Mollo replied ‘we certify it ourselves’. I said nothing and got worried. It was simple: either yes he closed or an outsider certified it for you. I didn’t do anything, and it’s my great regret”. This was stated by Gianni Mion, former CEO of the Benetton Edizione holding company, former director of Aspi and its former parent company, Atlantia, at the trial for the collapse of the Morandi bridge. Mion said this referring to a meeting in 2010, i.e. eight years before the collapse, which was attended by the CEO of Aspi Giovanni Castellucci, the general manager Riccardo Mollo, Gilberto Benetton, the board of statutory auditors of Atlantia and, according to the manager’s recollection , technicians and managers of Spea. After these sentences, the lawyer Giorgio Perroni, who defends the former director of the First section of Autostrade, Riccardo Rigacci, asked to suspend the examination of Gianni Mion and to investigate him. Rigacci is being investigated along with 58 other people. Mion’s examination went ahead and the judges said they would reserve Perroni’s request.
In the courtroom Roberto Tomasi, current CEO of Autostrade, heard as a witness during the trial, he said: “In 2020 we saw an increase in risk coefficients of even more than 200% compared to those detected by Spea, while in 2019 it was 50%”. Spea was the company controlled by ASPI that was in charge of the surveillance. Tomasi spoke of Aspi’s change of pace after his arrival as CEO and general manager of Aspi. “Since the beginning of my mandate, in February 2019, as CEO of the Aspi group, I have put all my effort into implementing a major corporate transformation plan, renewing the management and radically changing the infrastructure monitoring and maintenance methods, also thanks to the adaptation of the regulations which has allowed us to strengthen our action. Currently the plan continues at full capacity on the entire national network. The change of pace of the company is an element recognized here too”. “The level of degradation of the network was substantially worse than what emerged from inspections by Spea. In 2019, we started with the verification of 33 works with two external companies, then moved on to 66. But seeing the non-homogeneity of the scores, we extended the controls to the whole network”.
With the arrival of Tomasi as CEO and general manager of Aspi, maintenance work on the motorway network increased. “We invested a lot on modernization and maintenance activities, especially the chapter on tunnels and viaducts”, he underlined during his examination. The prosecutor showed in the courtroom the slides that the CEO had brought during the investigation and which showed an increase from 264 to 769 million between 2017 and 2021, between the basic fee and the extraordinary plan. The latter also includes the restyling of tunnels and bridges. Tomasi explained how, after the decommissioning of Spea and the assignment of inspections to external companies, “27,000 defects were found throughout the network, with various degrees of severity, not reported by Spea, 6,000 in the tunnels of the Liguria. We considered it unreliable”.
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