Italy’s environment minister Corrado Clini will soon present to the Italian parliament an amendment to Decree 207/2012 which should force the Court of Taranto to abrogate its seizure order affecting semi-finished and finished steel products produced by Taranto-based Italian steelmaker Ilva from July 26 up to the signing of the mentioned decree. Minister Clini thus aims to bypass the recent decision by Taranto magistrate Patrizia Todisco who rejected the request by Ilva to regain possession of the confiscated steel.
According to Italian media reports, the amendment would give Ilva the green light for 36 months to perform production and sales activities, while it would also be free to sell those steel products produced before the entry into force of the decree itself.
Immediately after the announcement by the Court of Taranto of its rejection of Ilva’s petition for the cancellation of the seizure order, the company issued a press release detailing the consequences of such a decision. According to the statement, about 1.7 million mt of products worth €1 billion would remain at Taranto port and at the company’s warehouses. If Ilva is unable to deliver the finished and semi-finished products in question to its subsidiaries, the result, Ilva stated, will be a great number of redundancies due to lack of raw materials. The facilities involved are pipe mills and cold rolling mills in Taranto, but also all finishing lines run by Ilva in Italy, France, Tunisia, Greece and Ilva’s steel service centers based in Milan, Turin and Padua. Moreover, a huge number of international customers would be affected by the situation as delivery of orders would be postponed.