The Pini family, owners of the largest slaughterhouse in Europe in Binéfar (Aragon), once again add a scandal to their controversial record. Since this weekend, two of its members, aged 66 and 70, have been in a reported provisional prison regime and without bail after being arrested as alleged perpetrators of a crime of sexual assault against an employee and the commission of other possible crimes against workers’ rights.
Apparently, the complaint was filed at the beginning of June by a woman who works in one of the meat companies that the Italian group owns in the Litera area, where in 2019 the large pig slaughterhouse of the Litera Meat company began to operate. It employs 1,600 people.
The subsequent investigation by the Civil Guard led to the arrest this weekend of the two men, who gave a statement before the Monzón duty judge before entering the Zuera prison.
The alleged sexual assaults for which they were arrested were continuous over time, although not perpetrated jointly, as the complainant’s lawyer told the Heraldo de Aragón newspaper.
He also pointed out that the summary secrecy has not been decreed, although it is possible that it is done to favor the investigation. Among other issues that must be clarified are the place or places where the alleged attacks occurred as well as the nature of the workplace harassment that has also been denounced.
The oldest detainee is Piero Pini, the owner of the group, known for having had several run-ins with the law in several European countries. At the beginning of March 2019, he was arrested along with two other partners in Hungary, where he had a meat industry, accused of millionaire tax fraud. The Kecskemét district court then refused to grant him a bail of one million euros to avoid the destruction of evidence and extended his preventive detention until the beginning of July 2019. After the trial, Pini was released from prison in December.
The businessman had experienced a similar situation three years earlier in Poland, where his activities at the Kutno plant also led to his arrest at the end of 2016 for alleged tax fraud of 100 million euros. On that occasion, he was released on bail after being arrested for two days.
Despite the fact that his legal problems were well known, the Government of Aragon and the Binéfar City Council did not stop Pini’s million-dollar investment in Spain, arguing that there was no record that he had broken the law in the country and that it could not be put a sanitary cord before the arrival of a millionaire investment.
In August 2017, barely six months after his arrest in Poland, the businessman presented the macro-slaughterhouse project at the headquarters of the Government of Aragon accompanied by the Aragonese president, Javier Lambán, and the mayor of Binéfar, Alfonso Adán.
After its start-up in 2019, the company built another in San Esteban de la Litera, while the third project for its expansion in Aragon was a ham dryer in Albelda. The meat company assured that its investment in all the plants in the region of La Litera would be around 200 million euros.
