After the Bridge it’s time for the Games. According to the investigating judge, the decree with which the government made the Milan-Cortina Foundation a “private law entity” would be “unconstitutional”. Ball to the Council. The Court of Auditors comes back to life: the law on short-term rentals will favor the undeclared economy
Since July the decision seemed to be stuck in the court’s drawers. Then, two days after the article from Truth which signaled paralysis, something has been unlocked. And so does the judge of the preliminary investigations Patricia Nobile accepted the request of the Milan Prosecutor’s Office and decided to refer to the Constitutional Court the decree law of the Meloni government which, in the summer of 2024, had classified the Milan-Cortina 2026 Foundation as a “private law body”. The law was designed to protect the Olympic machine from investigations and administrative blocks, but now it ends up under the scrutiny of the Council for possible unconstitutionality.
The decision comes after months of waiting and a series of postponements that had also irritated the Milanese judicial leaders. Moreover, on the upper floors of the courthouse there were fears that a late choice, in the middle of winter, could affect the Olympics, which will begin in ninety days. Now, however, the investigating judge has decided to decide. And so after the project of the Bridge over the Strait of Messina (rejected by the Court of Auditors) and the decree on short-term rentals (again criticized by the accounting judiciary), a new front is now opening between the executive and the officials, this time on the Olympic Games.
On 11 June 2024, within the “Post-disaster reconstruction” decree, the government had included a provision that excluded the Milan-Cortina Foundation from public law and the procurement code, defining it as a subject “operating according to entrepreneurial criteria”. For the Prosecutor’s Office – with the prosecutors Tiziana Siciliano, Alessandro Gobbis And Francesco Cajani – that provision was a bespoke provision, designed to defuse the ongoing investigation and lacking any real urgency. The judge Patricia Nobile he shared the reading: the decree, he wrote, directly affects criminal proceedings and goes beyond the scope of the law that contains it. An assessment that is equivalent to a constitutional yellow card: the word passes to the Council, but the decision will only come after the Olympic Games. On the criminal side, the investigations remain suspended. But after the Court’s decision they could reopen by broadening their range of action. At the moment there are two tenders at the center of the file: the first of 2021, entrusted to Vetrya for 1.9 million; the second in 2023, assigned to Deloitte Consulting.
In his technical report, the prosecutor’s consultant Stefano Martinazzo highlighted “critical issues in the management of contractual relationships and in the principles of transparency”, reporting that Deloitte would have received privileged information and presented a late discount not foreseen by any exclusivity clause. For the prosecutors, the Foundation remains a public entity, guided by state-appointed bodies and bound to purposes of general interest. This was also confirmed by the Veneto Court of Auditors, which in the budget as of 31 December 2023 detected a deficit of 107.8 million euros and reminded that, if it is necessary to cover it, the State and local administrations will pay.
The Olympic affair is only the latest chapter in an increasingly deep rift between the judiciary and the government. The Senate has just approved the Nordio reform, which separates the careers of judges and prosecutors and establishes two distinct Superior Councils of the Judiciary. For the government it is a “balance and modernity” reform; for the robes, however, a historical caesura that reduces the autonomy of prosecutors and brings justice closer to politics.
Approved without a two-thirds majority, the reform will have to pass through the confirmatory referendum, scheduled for spring 2026, right after the Council’s decision on the Olympic decree. Between the Constitutional Court and the ballot boxes, justice thus returns to the center of institutional confrontation, and every choice made by the courts – such as that on Milan-Cortina – becomes a political test. Not only that. On the Messina Bridge, tension has already exploded after the Court of Auditors denied the legitimacy of the Cipess (Interministerial Committee for Economic Planning and Sustainable Development) resolution which approved the final project, pointing out documentary gaps, uncertainties about costs and incomplete coverage. The Ministry of Infrastructure, led by Matteo Salvinispoke of “bureaucratic sabotage”, accusing the accounting judiciary of wanting to slow down a “strategic work for the country”. The Court replied that its task is to guarantee preventive supervision of public spending, recalling that the project does not yet have a certified economic estimate.
Even on the short-term rental front, tension remains high, and now it is the Court of Auditors that is sounding the alarm. With the entry into force of the National Identification Code (Cin) for all tourist locations, provided for by the Cohesion decree, the government claims to have imposed rules and transparency in a rapidly growing sector. But according to accounting judges, the new tax rules risk pushing part of the market into irregularity. In the latest report, the Court warned that the difference in tax regime between short-term rentals and ordinary rentals “could incentivize the phenomenon of undeclared rentals”, expanding the area of the underground economy. While the Olympic flame prepares to light up, the battle between the judiciary and the government remains open. Meanwhile, Palazzo Chigi defends the decree, claiming to have acted to guarantee the success and transparency of the Games in compliance with European standards.
