By Francesca Landini
MILAN (Reuters) -Italian prosecutors on Saturday charged seven people and two subcontractors with crimes including fraud and failure to comply with aircraft safety rules, following an investigation into suspected defective parts produced by an Italian company for Boeing (NYSE: ).
Prosecutors began their investigation in late 2021 after Boeing said some parts of its 787 Dreamliner plane supplied by a company working for Italian aerospace group Leonardo had been manufactured incorrectly.
Investigators discovered that two Italian subcontractors used cheaper, non-conforming forms of titanium and aluminum to make certain parts, saving significant sums of money on their raw material costs, prosecutors said in a statement, without naming the subcontractors or the contractors. seven people.
“This resulted in the manufacture of aircraft parts with significantly lower static and stress resistance characteristics, which has an impact on aviation safety,” prosecutors in the southern city of Brindisi said.
Two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that Leonardo's former supplier Manufacturing ProcessSpecification (MPS) and its now-bankrupt predecessor company, Processi Speciali, were the two companies at the center of the investigation.
The owner of MPS, Antonio Ingrosso, and his father Vincenzo, director of Processi Speciali, were two of the seven people involved in the investigation.
The two men are “convinced that they have acted in full compliance with the law,” their lawyer told Reuters.
The seven people and the two subcontractors will now have time to present new evidence in their defense before prosecutors decide whether to ask a judge to hold a trial.
Aerospace experts who worked with prosecutors certified at least 4,829 nonconforming components made of titanium and 1,158 made of aluminum, prosecutors said.
“The work of experts and investigations concluded that some non-conforming structural components could, in the long term, harm the safety of the aircraft, which would force the American company to initiate an extraordinary maintenance campaign for the aircraft involved,” they said, and they added Boeing and Leonardo were victims of the alleged crimes and cooperated with the investigation.
Leonardo and Boeing declined to comment.
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