06/07/2024 – 20:05
The São Paulo Court has determined that the company Libbs Farmacêutica must pay, as compensation, R$600,000 to the family – half for each child – of journalist and presenter Ricardo Boechat, who died in February 2019 after the helicopter crash that was transporting him from the interior of the state to the capital.
Before the plane crash, Boechat was participating as a speaker at an event organized by Libbs in Campinas (SP). To return to São Paulo, where he worked, an aircraft was hired by the organizers of the meeting, but it ended up suffering engine failure and crashed before reaching the capital of São Paulo. The pilot also died after the crash.
In a note sent to the press this Saturday, the 6th, the company said that it “does not comment on ongoing processes”, but “that it respects all court orders” (see more below).
The pharmaceutical company claimed to the court that it was not responsible for the accident, since the air transportation had been contracted by a third-party company responsible for organizing the event. “However, this hypothesis was rejected in the trial. The panel understood that the defendant was responsible not only for the safety of its contractor during the event, but also on the way there and back, and should therefore repair the damages, in accordance with the Civil Code,” the Court of Justice of São Paulo reported in a statement.
The decision was made by the 38th Private Law Chamber of the Court of Justice of São Paulo, unanimously by judges Fernando Sastre Redondo and Flávio Cunha da Silva. The judges, however, reduced the amount of compensation for moral damages from R$1.2 million to R$600 thousand.
“The manner in which the transportation was carried out, whether directly by the appellee or through another company hired by it to perform this service, does not alter the indisputable fact that it, in fact, expressly assumed the obligation towards the journalist to carry out his transportation, so that he could give the talk at the appellant’s festive event”, wrote Judge Spencer Almeida Ferreira, rapporteur of the case.
“The chain of liability is therefore clear and established in the documents and the defendant is at the highest point, and it is forbidden to hide behind the indirect liability of companies it hired to hold the event, which it itself was the sole recipient and interested party in,” concluded the judge. The panel of judges was completed by judges Fernando Sastre Redondo and Flávio Cunha da Silva.
When contacted, the pharmaceutical company said that it “does not comment on ongoing proceedings”, but “that it respects all court orders”. “The company reinforces its commitment to transparency and truth, ensuring that it will continue to cooperate fully with the authorities”, Libbs informed in a note.
In 2020, one year after the accident, the Center for Investigation and Prevention of Aeronautical Accidents (Cenipa), of the Brazilian Air Force (FAB), identified that the causes of the plane crash were caused by a failure in the helicopter’s engine, and that the pilot had attempted to land on a strip of grass between the two upper lanes of the Rodoanel Mário Covas. Unsuccessful in the maneuver, he passed under an overpass, where he ended up crashing the aircraft, still in flight, into a truck.
Cenipa mentions in the report that the date of the last general overhaul of one of the aircraft’s compressors was 1988. Furthermore, the FAB found that, during the special technical inspection, the part had been replaced with a newer one during an assessment carried out in 2017 by Anac, and reinstalled less than three months later, even though the authorization had expired.
In conclusion, the document points out six main factors that contributed to the accident: the pilot’s attitude in not observing the necessary maintenance actions; the organizational culture of the companies involved in the aircraft rental; the “flight indiscipline”, in which the operator did not have authorization or qualification; the “pilot’s judgment”, in considering that the helicopter’s engine was suitable for takeoff; the aircraft’s maintenance; and the decision-making and organizational processes.
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