Milan, 'Unico Brera' tower seized: 27 under investigation
The public prosecutor's office is targeting the building site of Rs Srl, a company owned by the Rusconi brothers. In the building prices of flats from 660 thousand euro upwards. The accusation is of abusive allotment
by Sara Monaci
Yet another seizure in Milanese construction. The investigation into town planning evidently does not stop. The soldiers of the Economic and Financial Police Unit of the Milan Finance Police are currently executing a preventive seizure order issued by Milan's gip, Mattia Fiorentini, of the "Unico-Brera" building site in the very central Via Anfiteatro 7. There are 27 suspects, and some names are repeated from other seizures, such as those of Marco Cerri and Giovanni Oggioni or Alessandro Scandurra. The pattern resembles that of the other five seizures already in progress.
The real estate project of the builders Carlo and Stefano Rusconi with Rs Srl aims to transform two eighteenth-century ruins of 5 and 3 storeys, demolished in 2006, into a tower of 11 storeys over 34 metres, 27 flats and 45 potential inhabitants. The work was supposed to be completed this year and was authorised, as in other dozens of cases that have come under the magistrates' lens, with a Scia, Certified Declaration of Start of Activity, as a 'building renovation' in 2019 and, subsequently, with another variant Certified Declaration of Start of Activity in 2023.
Hence the allegation of illegal subdivision, which has specific suspects and circumscribed criminal cases, but which in general as a phenomenon, given its vastness, calls into question Milan's vision of property growth over the last 10-15 years. The issue is linked not only to the fact that the Scia, a de facto self-certification, was so easily granted by the Municipality's executive bodies, but also to the fact that the whole longer process of recognising an implementation plan, which would serve to calibrate the district's new needs in terms of services, greenery, parking, offices, was 'avoided'.
Moreover, another dispute in the background is that it was improperly a Landscape Commission that gave the authorisations - now corrected after a recent resolution of the municipality that takes note of the findings of the Public Prosecutor's Office and of some judgments -, which went beyond its advisory role and took on the role of building commission. It is a shame, however, according to the public prosecutor's office, that within the commission there were also architects and planners who had professional relationships and ongoing commissions with private individuals. On this point, the Milan Public Prosecutor's Office is also contesting corruption, but the road is uphill (the re-examination has freed all those remanded in custody).
The people under investigation today are 27 for building abuse, illegal subdivision and forgery, including contractors, architects, former members of the landscape commission and municipal officials. According to the public prosecutor's office, there can be no renovation on "a free area", because it was demolished more than ten years before the start of work, an argument on which in recent weeks the prosecutors have received the go-ahead from the Council of State, which has established the "contextuality" between demolition and reconstruction as one of the limits of renovation, writing that one cannot "consider" that a "demolition" gives rise to a "sort of volumetric credit" that the owner can spend at any time.
