Departed from his duties and arrested in December 2020, Mustapha Aroui and three other defendants were sentenced to three years in prison by a Tunis court, who made his verdict late Tuesday.
MO12345lemonde with AFP
This scandal had highlighted the world’s trade in waste. A former Tunisian Minister of the Environment was sentenced to three years in prison for his role in an illegal import case of household waste in Italy, the local media reported on Wednesday.
Mustapha Aroui had been removed from his duties and arrested in December 2020 with several officials of his ministry as part of an investigation into this case which caused scandal in Tunisia.
m. Aroui and three other defendants were sentenced to three years in prison by a Tunis court which returned his verdict Tuesday, the media announced. A former executive of the ministry was inflicted a sentence of ten years in prison and another suspect, on the run, was sentenced in absentia to fifteen years in prison, according to the same source. Six others have been acquitted.
Protests of the population
The case dates back to July 2020 when this household waste, the importation of which is prohibited by law, had been transported to Tunisia in 280 containers by a Tunisian company which had falsely claimed that it was plastic waste intended to be recycled. Shipped from the Campania region, in southern Italy, 213 containers had been stored in Port Sousse (East), and the rest (67) in a warehouse near this coastal city.
Tunisia re -expressed in February 2022 in Italy the 213 containers stored in Sousse after a bilateral agreement. The return of the rest of the waste containers, damaged by a fire in December 2021, is still the subject of consultations.
The manager of the importing company, on the run, had signed with an Italian company a contract for the elimination of 120,000 tonnes, at a price of 48 euros per tonne – a total exceeding 5 million euros.
This case caused protest movements of the population and local NGOs in Tunisia, which had expressed their refusal that their country was the “trash” of Italy.