Lunchtime update from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry:
President of Arconic's French arm accepts customers were 'deliberately and dishonestly misled' over fire classification of cladding panels, as he is asked about email saying failed fire test must be kept 'VERY CONFIDENTIAL'
The most interesting point of this morning's evidence came right at the end of the session when Claude Schmidt was grilled about an email his colleague Claude Wehrle sent regarding the serious failure of polyethylene-cored ACM panels when bent into a cassette form in March 2010
Remember: Arconic in 2004/5 tested its ACM PE panel when bent into cassette and when bolted to a wall with rivets. The cassette version failed spectacularly, burning 10 times as fast. But Arconic dismissed this as a 'rogue result' and drew no distinction in its marketing...
... simply presenting the panel as a 'Class B' (the rating for the rivetted panel, and the required standard for many European countries). Skip forward to 2010, and this email chain.
Mr Wehrle, the firm's senior technical member of staff is told about a trend in Spain and Portugal where clients are demanding more fire resistant panels, and warned that with this type of panel "our prices are no longer in the market"