Italian court quashes Swiss industrialist asbestos jail term

Eternit trial: the Court of Cassation quashes the appeal judgment Keystone-SDA

A nine-year Italian prison sentence handed out to Swiss industrialist Stephan Schmidheiney, relating to asbestos deaths, has been quashed because the 2025 verdict was not translated into German.

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The former executive at Swiss company Eternit was handed a nine years and six months jail term by the Turin Court of Appeal on April 17, 2025. But the Italian Supreme Court has annulled the judgement on the grounds that Schmidheiney was denied fair rights of defence.

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Under Italian procedural law, judgments must be conveyed in a language that defendants can understand.

The Piedmontese judges will have to translate the ruling into a language known to the businessman, in this case German, and notify it to the accused and his defence, the Italian news agency ansa reported on Wednesday.

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The parties will then have another opportunity to appeal to the Supreme Court on the merits of the case.

The trial followed the deaths of 91 people as a result of exposure to asbestos at the Eternit factories in Casale Monferrato (Piedmont). It followed a wide-ranging investigation into Eternit opened by the Turin public prosecutor’s office in 2004.

At first instance, Schmidheiny was sentenced to 12 years in prison. The public prosecutor’s office had requested a conviction for murder, but the appeal judges ruled that he was guilty of manslaughter.

“We are bitter. The delays are getting longer and there is a great risk that many other cases will be time-barred”, was the reaction on Wednesday of the Sicurezza e Lavoro association, one of the civil parties in the long-running Eternit trial.

Translated from French by AI/mga

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