This is how, on April 20, 2023, Mayor Brugnaro addressed Walter Molino, a journalist from Report, as he refused to answer a question. As chance would have it, today it is Brugnaro himself and the galaxy that revolves around him that appear to be the scum of Italy. We are not talking about a rotten apple here, but an entire basket that is rotten: the leaders of the political administration, managers of the Municipality and of important investee companies and numerous entrepreneurs. In short, a phenomenon with systemic and systematic evidence. It is true that the journalist asked the mayor questions about the Scuola della Misericordia during a press conference on another topic, but what else could a journalist do when in possession of burning news to question the mayor about when the mayor himself evades, does not respond, and refuses to be cross-examined.
Brugnaro complained about the inappropriate venue and refused to answer, irritated by the questions being asked, which he considered impertinent and out of context. However, their relevance would be demonstrated by the services broadcast on Nov. 5, 2023 “La Misericordia di Brugnaro” and on Dec. 17, 2023 “There was a Chinese man in Venice”, which opened the Pandora’s box of those who manage the city administration as though they owned it, by subordinating the public interest to the private. The matter cannot be dismissed as a controversy between a public figure and the journalists who are hounding him (as Il Gazzettino did the day after the broadcast). It is not a question of allusions or inferences, conjectures or suppositions, but news of crimes, as subsequent judicial documents demonstrate.
The classic straw would have been enough to break the camel’s back, but a downpour arrived, and the city found itself submerged in the mud of the corporate management of the Municipality of Venice. The mayor is endearing, stunned and indignant at the accusations, which he doesn’t understand; he says he is sincerely convinced that he has done a public service with his commercial and entrepreneurial management of the city. He feels he has to be the business agent of the lagoon city, the goose that lays golden eggs which are then fried on the mainland, where the mayor’s electorate is. It is an absolute and unprecedented novelty to see a mayor acting as his own broker, doing his utmost to advocate for real estate transactions on land he personally owns, reassuring Kwong about the possibilities of increasing the value of the area and of the investment. So much so that in the video of 24 April 2016 the mayor can be seen saying “everything can be built on here, this here is a basin of water, it’s not land, it’s water so there was a lot of reasoning to do here if you wanted…”. Unlike the film Totòtruffa, in which Totò sells the Trevi fountain, here the mayor is actually the owner, having purchased the area made up of two separate marshy areas which could be unified after the purchase. The experience and ability of Luciana Colle, former official deputy director of state property and then deputy mayor of Venice from 2015 to 2020 with responsibilities for housing and residence policies, the reorganization of assets, and state property federalism must have been useful. She returned to the state property agency at the end of her mandate in 2020. She can be seen in the videos broadcast by Report taking part in institutional meetings with the Chinese tycoon Kwong.
From reading the text of the complaint presented to the Court of Auditors by the architect Alberto Bernstein on March 2, 2020, where the doubt is raised that a cadastral change in the areas which occurred after the purchase of the Pili area on February 28, 2006 may have benefited Mayor Brugnaro’s company, Porta di Venezia Srl, it seems that Brugnaro knows well how to intervene on that space between land and water. In fact, there seems to be something unusual. However, the prosecutor’s office found anomalies and in the first instance the sentence was in favor of the Mayor.
The following are two plans that were attached to the complaint. Beyond the presumed advantage for the functional unification of the area, the fact remains that land purchased for around 5 million euros in 2006 was revalued at 14 million and, following the failure of the Kwong transaction, which increased the value by 150 million, the municipality decided to allocate an intermodal hub on part of the land, which brings the value of the land to 70.3 million euros.
Public is not an extension of private interests to the public sphere
In corporate logic, the private individual makes profits to accumulate wealth, while the public entity should invest its revenue to satisfy the needs of the inhabitants. However, for some time the mayor has been prey to a delusion of omnipotence, and has favored the creation of giant works to the detriment of essential services. Public building assets have been neglected, and urban “regeneration” projects generally involve the installation of hotels. Nothing is being done to alleviate the housing emergency, and the absence of housing policies that involve constraints and incentives encourages the proliferation of unregulated and highly profitable tourist rentals to the detriment of the housing market for residents in both rentals (which cannot be found) and sales (unattainable due to the prohibitive increase in costs).
Brugnaro has followed in the footsteps of the undisputed patriarch of conflicts of interest, Berlusconi. But he thinks he’s smarter, convinced he has resolved the issue with that blind trust, which seems to be doing very well judging by the surge in profits of his LB Holding since he was elected. Despite a less than favorable economic situation with COVID-19, business for the mayor’s companies has remained in constant growth. There are no generic allegations against Brugnaro: the allegations concern acts and facts. Rather than generalities, we should talk about the general reality of a modus operandi practiced widely within an administration in which not a leaf moves that Brugnaro doesn’t want moved, so much so that Boraso’s appetites are known to the mayor. The wiretaps demonstrate that the mayor was aware of the councilor’s corrupt behavior, but he did not protest the circumstances, limiting himself to getting an earful and advising prudence, inviting the councilor to be more cautious and careful. Brugnaro seems to say that you either do things well or it is better not to do them. The mayor who calls for respect for decorum has behaved indecently. His right and left hand men (Ceron and Donadin) apparently sat at the transaction and negotiation tables playing the dual role of representatives of the Brugnaro companies (sponsored by the entrepreneurs) and of the cheerfully managed municipal administration. The shifting roles between companies, politics and administration created a quicksand in which policy has become mired.
To get special attention businesses pay contributions to Reyer or place orders with companies in the Brugnaro galaxy. Ceron is chief of staff and continued to be so after being appointed director general. In the meantime, he retained his position at Reyer, where he was an employee from 2009 to 2021 and a member of the Board of Directors from 2008 to 2015, receiving generous incomes in addition to those from the public service. Deputy Chief of Staff Donadini was an employee of Umana S.p.A. from 2008 to 2022 and was director of all the group companies (Porta di Venezia S.p.A., Consorzio Produzione Sviluppo Nordest, Scuola della Misericordia S.p.A., Salviati Srl, SIV Srl, Venice City Park Srl, Puliverde Srl, San Giobbe Arl Abate Zanetti Srl). Also in the magic circle are Giovanni Seno (administrator of the strategic municipal company AVM, which among other things controls ACTV, the public transportation company (which regularly uses private companies to integrate services by subcontracting routes such as that of water transport from the airport). Then there is Alessandra Bolognin (General Director of Insula, the company in charge of urban maintenance and public housing, and of IVE, a company that owns municipal real estate), Alessandro Catarossi (Manager of the Casinò di Venezia Spa company), and last but not least – Fabio Cacco, Boraso’s man, who moved from the municipal offices to the tenders and contracts office of AVM, which controls various companies and their related contracts.
It is clear that Brugnaro was incapable of keeping the two spheres distinct and caused a bit of confusion by managing the public administration like a private company, whose aim is to make profits and accumulate wealth, not allocating revenues to satisfy the needs of the citizenry, as the public administration should do. Brugnaro flaunts the reduction of municipal debt and claims as virtuous the use of the sums obtained from the recovery of public accounts (integrated with new debts) to carry out major works at the expense of the quality of services to residents. Consider the accident at the overpass near the Mestre station [when a bus overturned and fell on the road below, killing many passengers – Ed.], whose safety should have been the priority, but it was preferred to put the construction of a new large overpass between San Giuliano and the Scientific and Technological Center ahead of the needed remediation. On that front, news will certainly arrive on the judicial level.
After winning the elections in 2015, Brugnaro consolidated his result with a second victory in 2020, occupying the Municipality with a power bloc based on a patronage system that pervades every area of municipal administrative activity. The accusations do not concern formal irregularities in financing, but rather the corruption of the city’s top management in the exercise of their functions as public administrators, both at the basic level of orders for the provision of services and contracts for supplies and maintenance, and at the more attractive level of large urban transformation projects.
Private (verb) is the result of subtracting
The facts documented by Report are indisputably serious, and add to the previous press articles or television reports that have put the spotlight on Mayor Brugnaro, who has been accused of administering the city and the majority that governs it with the attitude of a master, forgetting that el paron of Venice has always been the bell tower of San Marco, which marked the working day and social life with the tolling of its bells. Just as the city does not belong to him, the mayor does not belong to the city. He lives in the province of Treviso and is therefore detested by the majority of citizens of the ancient city who consider him not exactly a stranger, but certainly a campagnolo – a countryside man – so much so that he was given the nickname grebano (which comes from the Slovenian greben – mountain crest – and in Genoese it has acquired the connotation of a rude, slutty person, typical of someone who lives outside the world, a paradoxical attribute for someone who wants to be credited as a protagonist of worldliness). He hates the inhabitants of the lagoon city to the point that as soon as he was re-elected in 2020 he promised to make the Venetians pay (https://ytali.com/2020/09/23/e-dopo-il-voto-il-sindaco-taglia-il -ponte-con-venezia/) and has done so, renouncing the opportunity that Venice alone has to regulate and thus limit tourist rentals, continuing to open new hotels, tolerating destructive motor boat waves, encouraging speculative projects, penalizing the historical city to the advantage of the mainland cities, all while withdrawing delegations from the municipalities and weakening administrative decentralization… Brugnaro was never the mayor of all the citizens, but he ultimately deprived the entire city of Venice of its dignity.
Private (noun) is the right to privacy, not to reticence
Parallel to the ascertainment of judicial responsibilities there is the assumption of political responsibility. The mayor does not like confrontation: he prefers long solitary monologues, like those he is used to delivering in a city council that is now gagged by a regulation that he introduced, which drastically shortens the speaking times for the councilors while allowing the assessors and the mayor to intervene at will and repeatedly with speeches of indefinite and discretionary duration.
This cannot be glossed over, avoiding discussion with the city council and setting a date for the matter to be discussed on September 9th. The opposition rightly requested and obtained by regulation an extraordinary session to be held in Mestre on August 2nd, however – despite the importance of the discussion – and exception to the regulation, increasing the minutes allowed for each intervention to 8, was rejected, thus confirming the 4-minute limit (while the mayor will be free to speak as he pleases). Where are we, in Mouseville, Duckburg, or in Venice, city of the world?
Translation by Paul Rosenberg
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