On November 20, 2019, after the first session of this phase, the defendants’ defenses assumed the objective of reaching an agreement with the 73 victims identified in the prosecution, but remained confident should the case come to trial.
In the prosecution of the MP, an administrator, the director and the supervisor of the production sector of Adubos de Portugal (ADP) are accused.
According to the prosecutor’s order, in addition to João Cabral, José Carvalhinho and Eduardo Ribeiro, four employees, all chemical engineers, from General Electric (GE), a company contracted by ADP Fertilizantes to inspect and monitor the towers of cooling.
Of all the cases notified to the Directorate-General for Health, the MP was only able to establish the causal link in 73 situations, since in the remaining cases it was “unfeasible to collect clinical samples” or “the strain was not identified or the strain identified was different from that detected in the environmental samples collected ”.
The MP maintains that the outbreak of ‘legionella’ in the municipality of Vila Franca de Xira was caused by the “manifest lack of care” of the defendants, who did not comply with “a set of rules and techniques in the conservation / maintenance” of one of the cooling towers of the ADP.
ADP, GE and the remaining seven defendants are charged with a crime of breaking construction rules, damage to facilities and disruption of services. The three ADP officials and the four GE employees, Ricardo Lopes, Maria Viana, Liliana Correia and Nélio Moreira, are also responsible for 20 crimes of negligence against their physical integrity.
The MP reports that “all the defendants and each one of them acted with a manifest lack of care, which the general social security duty advises, as they omitted important actions when negotiating, concluding and executing the contract between the defendant companies ADP and GE”.
MP Prosecutor Helena Leitão concluded that, if the actions had been carried out, “they would be decisive for the microbiological development, namely of the ‘legionella’ bacterium, to have not occurred and spread, by aerosolization, under the terms in which it was”.
The outbreak of ‘legionalla’ in Vila Franca de Xira, the third with the most cases worldwide, was controlled in two weeks.
Legionnaires’ disease, caused by the bacteria ‘Legionella pneumophila’, contracts by inhaling contaminated water vapor droplets (aerosols) so small that they transport the bacteria to the lungs, depositing it in the pulmonary alveoli.
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