Save Milan, the municipality closes the doors of the construction office

Construction office closed to the public: 'No outsiders will be allowed access to the offices'. From the Municipality of Milan comes this harsh response to the latest investigations by the Public Prosecutor's Office on the hypothesis of illegal allotment. While the Chamber of Deputies continues to search for a solution to the Save Milan bill, the administrative activities of Palazzo Marino are becoming flooded.

The indication came in a service provision that explicitly responds to the activities of the Public Prosecutor's Office. The decision comes, in fact, considering 'the objective difficulty for the employees of the One Stop Shop for Construction to continue serenely in their work without the possibility, while waiting for the investigations and possible trials to clarify the contested facts, of affirming the defence of their administrative choices'. To avoid misunderstandings, then, very drastic measures are taken.

The appointment-booking service will therefore be 'formally discontinued', in order to 'eliminate any channel of informal contacts through which information can be provided on the preliminary investigation of practices in progress or to give any technical or procedural clarifications that are prodromal to the formalisation of building permits'. Only those appointments that have already been made will be completed, with no further interpretations of the regulations, the rest will stop. Citizens and/or professionals' may not 'be received' by employees of the Municipality's Urban Regeneration Department.

It will only be the managers who will convene 'the operators and/or professionals to settle issues related to the preliminary investigation', not for other matters. The procedures are then tightened up: 'It is recommended to intervene with the foreseen interventions of denial where projects are not properly integrated and regularised according to the law'.

The dozens of investigations launched by the Milan public prosecutor's office have created a climate of tension for about a year now. At the beginning of 2024, the municipality had even drawn up a 'self-protection' resolution, asking its officials to follow the indications emerging from the decisions of the gip, which imposed the seizure of many buildings under construction in Milan. But the situation precipitated a week ago, with the latest seizure, that of the 'Scalo House' structure, belonging to the Green Stone group, where a university residence is being built and where two new residential buildings, of 8 and 13 storeys, are under construction. The judge who ordered the seizures gave a harsh message this time: "the world of town planning is allegedly made up of "pressure groups that control the most lucrative real estate operations, and actively work to ensure the maintenance of such a system", excluding "those who do not belong to it", and to "prevent the Municipality's action from being brought back onto the tracks of respect for the territory and legality".