The investigation

Milan investigation: Tancredi, Catella and 3 others under house arrest. Gip: serious indications of guilt

Milan Court Judge Mattia Fiorentini decided to remand in custody entrepreneur Andrea Bezziccheri, CEO of Bluestone, in the context of the maxi-investigation into the city's urban planning

31 July 2025

4' min read

Much of the Milan Public Prosecutor's indictment has been confirmed. According to the gip Mattia Fiorentini, the main six suspects in the maxi investigation on town planning (in which the mayor Giuseppe Sala is also under investigation for forgery and induction to give or promise benefits) must be placed in custody. The former councillor Giancarlo Tancredi, the ceo of the real estate company Coima Manfredi Catell, the chairman of the former municipal commission on landscape Giuseppe Marinoni, and architects Alessandro Scandurra and Federico Pella are thus going to house arrest - although the public prosecutor's office was asking for jail time for the last three -, while entrepreneur Andrea Bezziccheri, Bluestone's managing director, is going to prison. For him, there could be a broader investigation into the foreign funds controlling the company, from which payments to members of the Landscape Commission would have come out. This could be a new line of inquiry.

For all of them, meanwhile, the main charges are of corruption and forgery (with regard to declarations of conflict of interest). For Tancredi, on the other hand, it should be emphasised that it is 'conspiracy to corrupt', i.e., as the investigators themselves emphasise, he would not have received benefits but allowed others to be paid and favoured within the system.

According to the gip, there was a 'consolidated system of corruption and intermingling of public and private interests' for the 'division of building land'. And 'by bribing the chairman' of the Landscape Commission Marinoni, the vice-chairman Giovanni Oggioni and individual members including Scandurra, 'in their turn influencable by the former and subject to pressure from Tancredi', 'important private builders were able to obtain information, advances and a focus on the practices of interest'. Among the tools used by the 'system' were allegedly discretionary powers not provided for by state and regional laws, and also a certain 'terminological manipulation', i.e. minutes and terms used in an 'involuted and obscure' manner, as well as the forcing of the recognition of the public-private partnership, in order to speed up authorisation processes.

Recall that there are a total of 74 indicted.

What makes pre-trial detention necessary for the judge is 'the danger of reiteration of offences'. In addition, the judge emphasises in the pre-trial detention order that there are "serious indications of guilt", excluding, however, two episodes of corruption against the former chairman of the Landscape Commission Marinoni and the 'Pirellino' project involving, among others, the former councillor Tancredi, Marinoni himself and the businessman Catella. This affair still appears controversial, because while the prosecution has emphasised that in this context Catella, together with the archistar Stefano Boeri, lobbied for the Torre Botanica project to be realised, it is also true that the authorisation never arrived and a dispute is ongoing between Catella's Coima and the municipality (the municipality had asked for a share of social housing that Catella did not want to realise, claiming that he had bought the building under different agreements). On this point the story is probably still to be untangled.

Turning to the investigation, the focus of the investigation is theLandscape Commission, considered by the prosecutors to be the 'full core of the pathologies of urban management in the municipality, polluted by systemic corruption'.

This group of professionals, created years ago by the Pisapia junta - mainly at the behest of former deputy mayor Ada Lucia De Cesaris, who is under investigation in the enquiry - had been given a predominant and improper role, to the point of becoming the authorising body for city projects, bypassing the role of the junta and the council, according to the reconstruction of the prosecutors and the Pef unit of the Milan Gdf. This at least is the accusatory structure, from which Tancredi has always defended himself, claiming to have acted 'in the public interest'.

According to the prosecution, the people chosen for the Commission were often in a clear conflict of interest. A conflict that for the prosecutors translates for former chairman Marinoni and Commission member Scandurra into a real hypothesis of corruption: the consultancies that they pocketed from private individuals, while carrying out roles as public officials, for the prosecution would instead be 'disguised bribes' to favour the interests of construction companies. The two defended themselves against this hypothesis (in the case of Marinoni, also by means of a defence memorandum presented to the gip during the interrogation of guarantee), claiming that the rules on conflict of interest were not clear and that they would have abstained during the final vote on the approval of a project in which they were involved.

Scandurra in particular, the papers state, had 'ongoing professional and economic relations with the following real estate operators, whose building practices and related real estate transactions were assessed by the Commission of which he was a member: Egidio Holding of the Bluestone group; Castello Sgr; Kryalos sgr; Coima sgr'. Furthermore, it is underlined that 'as a public official from 2018 to 2024, he received from the company Kryalos - in the person of its legal representative Paolo Massimiliano Bottelli - sums of money amounting to at least EUR 2,579,127.98 against the issuing of invoices for professional services, thus being unlawfully remunerated for his functions as a public official'.

Sala: 'Never carried out any action that had a personal aim'

'I take note of the new measures issued today by the judiciary. The judge in charge of preliminary investigations did not consider the hypothesis of undue induction, which seems to have been addressed to me by the Milan Public Prosecutor's Office, to be subsistent'. This is how the mayor of Milan, Giuseppe Sala, commented in a note on the six arrests ordered today by Gip Mattia Fiorentini as part of the investigation into the urban planner that sees him under investigation. 'This, moreover, corresponds to my firmest conviction that I have never carried out any action that had a personal aim,' the city's premier underlines.