Major urban planning investigation: the public prosecutor’s office calls for the case against Sala, Boeri and Catella to be dropped

The Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office has requested that the cases against Mayor Giuseppe Sala, former Councillor for Urban Regeneration Giancarlo Tancredi, architect Stefano Boeri and Coima CEO Manfredi Catella – who are under investigation as part of the wide-ranging probe into town planning – be dismissed. A motion to dismiss the case has also been proposed for the former chair and former member of the Landscape Commission, Giuseppe Marinoni and Alessandro Scandurra. The case led to seven arrests in the summer of 2025, which were subsequently quashed by the Court of Review and the Court of Cassation (and also concerned the Pirellino project, which formed a separate strand of the investigation). The charges, which varied in nature, included corruption, undue influence and forgery.

The line of inquiry for which the public prosecutor’s office has requested the case be dismissed is the one with the greatest political impact, not least because it led to a month’s pre-trial detention. However, in the meantime, the first trials – also concerning unauthorised land subdivision – have resulted in the first acquittals.

One can, however, attempt to draw a conclusion from this wide-ranging investigation: the public prosecutor’s office itself had to backtrack, as there was evidently insufficient evidence to prove corruption. The main offence on which the investigations could have been based – abuse of office – was not pursued, as it is no longer a criminal offence.

However, the investigations have had a profound impact from an administrative perspective, effectively prompting the local council to review its practices: a scaling back of the role of the Landscape Commission, amendments to the General Town Plan (PGT) to reduce the height of skyscrapers, and a requirement for developers to prioritise the use of Implementation Plans over the ‘overused’ SCIA procedure, which ended up in the investigators’ files as a tool misused to build very tall blocks of flats in place of industrial warehouses.

The findings of the investigations were subsequently confirmed by two judgements – one by the Regional Administrative Court and one by the Court of Cassation – which reiterated the need to use the Implementation Plan as the preferred route for large-scale construction projects and, where the SCIA procedure is used, to comply with the outline of the previous structure. The investigations have therefore, for the time being, yielded more administrative than criminal outcomes.