The former mayor Gabriele Albertini claims the Milan model of his mandates and invites to caution: “A guarantee notice with a sentence”
While the urban investigation of the Milan prosecutor shakes Palazzo Marino and turns on the political debate on the hold of the junta, Gabriele Albertini – mayor of the city between 1997 and 2006 – intervenes with still but measured tones. In an interview with the Corriere della Serathe former first citizen claims the results achieved in his two mandates and invites to distinguish criminal liability from the political one, asking “balance” to those who today ask for the resignation of the mayor Giuseppe Sala.
Albertini starts from a data: «The Municipality of Milan, during my administration, has invested over 6 billion euros in public works. A figure never seen before in the history of the city ». To these are added, explains, over 30 billion of private urban planning investments catalyzed by an administration that has been able to make Milan “an attractive city” for national and international capital. All this, underlines, “without a single warranty notice”.
Urban transformation – from CityLife to the first projects of Porta Nuova – started from afar, Albertini recalls, and was accompanied by structural interventions such as the new metropolitan lines, the restoration of the Teatro alla Scala, the rebirth of entire neighborhoods and the direct management of complex dossiers, such as that of the purifier and traffic. “Even in those cases, despite my double role as mayor and commissioner, we had no problems with justice,” he reiterates.
As a question about what changed today, Albertini replies without rhetoric: «I see an administration that, with much less investments, is instead under judicial siege. We have 1,600 families who risk losing the house, businesses that could fail, and a potential block of urban development. If the capital are diverted elsewhere, the per capita income of the city will also suffer. ” And he quotes Luigi Einaudi: “Investors have a memory of elephant, rabbit heart and lepre’s legs”.
Albertini does not enter into the merits of the accusations that are shaking the current council, but bitterly observes the disproportion between what is invented then and the number of criminal proceedings today in progress. “I wonder why we managed to spend more than all, and we had no problems, while the poor room – who managed Expo with half of the capital – ended up on trial”.
The answer, for Albertini, also lies in the internal rules adopted in those years: “There was the Severino law, but I applied the” very severe law “: no assignment to those who had received even a guarantee notice. We had a constant relationship with the prosecutor: when I presented names, the prosecutor Borrelli warned me if someone was under investigation, even in a reserved and informal way ».
Albertini also claims the internal control model introduced well in advance of the times: «We had anticipated the Anac of Cantone by twenty years. We called him “Alì Babà”: three public ministries on duty and three high -level municipal leaders presided over each act to verify their vulnerability. We had introduced the “integrity pacts”: if a company made up the races or agreed under the back, it was excluded. In all, we expelled 600 of it. And there was an internal team, the internal auditing, made up of about twenty officials with complete access to all administrative acts, which analyzed not only the form, but also the substance “.
On the case that today involves the commissioner Tancredi, the architect Boeri and several other protagonists of the Milanese scene, Albertini prefers prudence. «I personally know both Catella and Tancredi, and I don’t think they are people without integrity. Boeri is an estimated architect all over the world. I am center -right, but for this reason I want to defend the institutions. I am contrary to exchange a warranty notice or the terrible deprivation of freedom with a sentence ».
Albertini also speaks from direct experience. «I lived on my skin an unfair process from which I came out totally innocent, with a definitive sentence. As a senator, I collected 194 signatures for a law that would allow the reimbursement of legal expenses to those who were acquitted with full formula – because the fact does not exist, does not constitute a crime or has not been committed “. And he cites a data: «Every year, in Italy, there are 90 thousand people in this situation. It is as if all La Spezia was unjustly accused. I told him to the then Minister Orlando. It is a civil and moral problem ».
On the judiciary, Albertini avoids populist drifts, but warns against a justice culture. «I was Jacobin and justice out of necessity – he confesses – when we had to expand the private investment to change the city. Mr. Hines, for example, told me that he invests 2 and a half billion because he knew that there was no paper in our administration that gave the cards. Architects such as skin, Libeskind, Isozaki, Zaha Hadid arrived with us. Milan has become a global city ».
His final appeal is an invitation to caution: «Legality is an indispensable pillar. But it is needed balance. I cannot think that they are all criminals and that the magistrate, only for the fact of exercising the control of legality, is a genius or a saint ».
