Milan, March 5 (LaPresse) – The Milanese suspects in the urban planning probe claim to have personally drafted the "Save Milan" law to halt the Prosecutor’s Office investigations and handed it over to the first rapporteur in the Chamber of Deputies, Tommaso Foti, a Fratelli d’Italia MP and currently Minister for European Affairs and the PNRR in the Meloni government.
This emerges from wiretaps reported by Milan’s investigating judge, Mattia Fiorentini, in the house arrest order for former Milan municipal official Giovanni Oggioni, accused of corruption, procedural fraud, and falsification.
In an intercepted phone call on October 24, 2024, with an expert urban planning lawyer, one of the suspects, Marco Emilio Cerri—an architect, former member of the landscape commission, and member of the VIA-VAS Commission for the Strait of Messina Bridge, for which the Prosecutor’s Office is requesting a suspension—stated that he had given the draft law to Foti, allegedly with the agreement of Milan’s Housing Councillor and prominent administrative lawyer, Guido Bardelli (who is not under investigation).
Cerri claims he had been drafting the bill since February 2024, just weeks after Judge Daniela Cardamone rejected the seizure of the Park Tower skyscrapers at Via Crescenzago 105 but upheld the full prosecutorial framework established by magistrates Petruzzella, Clerici, Filippini, and Siciliano in the first of about 20 urban planning investigations affecting construction sites and real estate projects in Milan.
The financial police’s investigation records also show a phone call (not transcribed) between Cerri and MP Maurizio Lupi on November 21, 2024, two hours before the approval in the Chamber of Deputies of a new urban planning and construction law, which is now stalled in the Senate. The suspect identifies former Infrastructure Minister Lupi as the lawmaker who provided him with the draft bill.
According to the Milan Prosecutor’s Office, the suspects, including Oggioni, repeatedly attempted to "pressure" their "political contacts" to pass the interpretative law that would block judicial investigations.