Seven PPC executives acquitted on appeal over 2017 lignite mine collapse
An appeals court in Western Macedonia on Thursday reversed a sentence imposed on seven former and current executives of state-run power utility PPC over a huge landslide at a lignite mine in the region of Kozani in 2017, which forced the evacuation of a nearby village.
The court accepted the claim that the mining-induced collapse was the result of numerous factors which could not have been predicted or avoided much earlier.
The defendants included the former chairman and chief executive officer of Public Power Corporation (PPC), Manolis Panagiotakis, the director of the Lignite Center of Western Macedonia, and the former managers of the mine, who were accused of endangering human lives and causing dangerous damage to the environment.
A lower court in Florina had imposed in 2022 an eight-month suspended sentence on seven of the nine executives of the Public Power Corporation accused in the case.
The collapse at the Amyntaio quarry on June 10, 2017 moved an estimated 80 million cubic meters of earth forcing dozens of residents of nearby village Agioi Anargyroi to evacuate their homes.
The mine had been shut down on June 3, 2017 amid stability concerns, but PPC officials had said that they did not expect a collapse of this magnitude.
But a report by the Greek Ombudsman in 2019 pointed to perennial delays or even inaction of the licensing and inspecting services. “It was established that years before the landslide, there had been cases of land cracks in the area which were never evaluated, while there was no timely mobilization by the services and the company even when these incidents intensified at the beginning of 2017. Their substantial reaction occurred only after the proliferation of cracks a few days before the landslide as well as after it,” the Ombudsman had said.
