Ex Ilva steelworks faces 90-day deadline to shut hot-end area, government scrambles to rewrite sale and save 10,000 jobs

The court order and its immediate fallout

The Court of Appeal of Milan has ordered the shutdown of the hot-end area of the former Ilva steelworks in Taranto within 90 days unless specific interventions on asbestos and PM10 and PM2.5 particulate emissions are carried out. The extraordinary commissioners of Acciaierie d'Italia (AdI) told a crisis meeting at Palazzo Chigi that complying within that window is technically impossible, though commissioner Giancarlo Quaranta stated that asbestos on site is "confined and under control" and that emission levels already fall within the Integrated Environmental Authorisation (AIA) limits. The government does not intend to challenge the ruling publicly; Undersecretary to the Prime Minister Alfredo Mantovano noted a "singular synchrony between the government's activity calendar, the union consultation calendar and the judicial decisions" but added that "nobody will make a controversy, we take the decree as a fact."

The jobs at stake

Shutting the hot-end area directly affects roughly 5,000 workers in that section, rising to about 8,000 when indirect employment is counted and up to 10,000 including the wider supply chain. The stoppage would also trigger knock-on effects at other group sites in Genoa, Novi Ligure and Racconigi, which depend on semi-finished steel from Taranto. Commissioners are already evaluating a halt across those plants and will define a shutdown calendar in the coming days.

We need a single decree that deals with the workers, who have paid the highest price, and with the city.

Rewriting the sale tender

The government intends to "re-parameterise" the ongoing privatisation tender, restricting it to the cold-end area only. Two international bidders, Jindal Steel International and Flacks Group (via its Flacksider project with Danieli and Metinvest), had submitted letters of interest for the full perimeter. The government is also sounding out Italian industrial groups Arvedi and Danieli for the revised tender. Without the hot-end, Taranto's rolling mills would need to be fed with imported slabs. Jindal's plan relies on a new plant in Oman that requires at least 30 months to complete, while Flacksider's electric-furnace and DRI solution would need 28 to 30 months even in the most favourable scenario, excluding demolition and reclamation. Logistics pose a further bottleneck: the internal system can move only about 900,000 tonnes of slabs per year from the port, far below the 5 to 6 million tonnes that would be needed.

The extraordinary plan and technical working group

Mantovano proposed an immediate technical working group, convening for the first time on Tuesday of the coming week at the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy (Mimit), with unions, the Puglia Region, the Municipality of Taranto and relevant ministries. Its mandate is to produce concrete proposals within roughly one month and bring them back to Palazzo Chigi for a definitive stock-taking meeting in September. Mantovano stressed that "there is no decision already taken nor any predetermined outcome: all working hypotheses will be examined, without prejudice and without predefined choices." The extraordinary plan remains a label for now; its contents (a new call for bids, social safety nets, fresh investments in the Taranto area) still need to be built from scratch.

So that it does not remain a slogan but translates into a concrete project, it is necessary to clearly define its prerequisites, starting from an in-depth technical assessment of the repercussions of the Milan Court of Appeal decree.

Union reaction and the coming weeks

At the close of the three-and-a-half-hour meeting, the metalworking federations Fim, Fiom and Uilm announced eight hours of strike action across all former Ilva sites and assemblies with workers. Union leaders acknowledged the government's openness to a dialogue that will continue through August and secured a commitment that no unilateral actions, including the initiation of the hot-end shutdown, will be taken while the technical talks are underway. Ferdinando Uliano of Fim Cisl said that "preventing the closure of the hot-end areas means finding solutions to build alternatives. We must take the time to find useful solutions." The 90-day clock is running, and the next milestone is the technical table's first session at Mimit.