May 10, 2024, 05:01
3 min read
CATANIA – An accident at work, in a service station where a man was hit by a motorcyclist. Then six years of litigation to have the right to an integration of compensation recognized, which must be paid not only by Inail but also by the insurance of the person who committed the accident.
This is the story that ended a few days ago in the Catania courtwhere a sentence defined as “historic” by the lawyer Andrea Carmanello, defender of the victim of the accident, established the award of “differential” compensation to the man hit by a scooter for the biological damage received.
The accident at work
The story begins in December 2018, when a truck driver stops in the Gelsobianco service area, on the Catania-Palermo, to refuel. As soon as he got off he was hit at high speed by a large-displacement Honda SH scooter, which was passing by the service area at that moment without stopping.
The truck driver falls to the ground and suffers several fractures, the asphalt is covered in blood and the service area enters into chaos. The driver of the scooter stops to help and will later take responsibility in court, declaring that while he was crossing the service area he had the sun in his eyes and was unable to see the man on foot who was about to refuel .
At these moments, a third person calls 118 to ask for an ambulance to arrive. Scared and in shock at the scene, he says he doesn’t know exactly how many people are involved and that he sees several scooters at the scene. The scooter rider’s insurance company will rely on this detail for the next six years, trying not to pay the “differential” biological damage.
Biological damage
The victim of the accident suffered one of the possible damages recognized in the Italian courts: there are moral damages, material ones, biological ones, or physical ones. The man, in other words, received several serious injuries for which he requested compensation. Since the accident occurred while he was working, part of the grant was supported by INAIL, which according to the schemes established by law provided compensation starting from the sixteenth day of illness onwards.
But the truck driver, assisted by his lawyer, also asked for coverage of the “differential” between the first and sixteenth day. It means that he asked the court to also recognize the biological damage caused by the investor, and therefore that his insurance pay compensation for that damage.
The process
The insurance company opposed the compensation, and the trial began at the civil court of Catania. During which the insurance representatives recovered and brought to the courtroom the recording of that phone call to 118 in which a frightened person asked for help but was unable to report the exact number of people involved.
Even though the scooter driver himself admitted his responsibilitythe insurance company refused to go ahead with the compensation claiming that it could not be established that its client was responsible for the accident.
The sentence
Until the last few days, six years after the accidentthe court ruled in favor of the victim of the accident, deciding that the insurance company must pay 27 thousand euros for differential compensation.
As the lawyer Andrea Carmanello explains, defender of the truck driver: “A historic ruling in a case of accident at work following a road accident. The Judge recognized the right of our client to be compensated not only by Inail, for the supplementary part, but also by whoever caused the event who in this case, being insured, also sees the defendant jointly and severally condemned Insurance Company to compensate for the biological damage suffered”.
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Published on
May 10, 2024, 05:01
