Operation Swamp: that is what the Italian Guardia di Finanza (financial police) and the Venetian judiciary are calling the ongoing investigation shaking the Venice Town Council, many of the companies connected with it, and Luigi Brugnaro, mayor of the city since 2015, who is under investigation for corruption, while one of his councillors, Renato Boraso, is actually under arrest.
Brugnaro insists that he is innocent but calls for his resignation are mounting. The alleged facts date back eight years but have only exploded recently after a detailed exposé by the RAI TV programme, Report, leading to detailed scrutiny of the matter, a flurry of arrests and formal warnings that personal investigations were ongoing.
At the heart of the matter is 100 acres of land called the Pili overlooking the lagoon at the bridge connecting Venice to the mainland. This had been bought from the Italian state by Brugnaro in 2006, before he became mayor, at the low price of €5m because it was heavily polluted by the nearby petrochemical works at Marghera. Brugnaro put the land into one of his companies, Porta di Venezia, and both he and the company negotiated directly with a Singaporean company, Oxley Holdings Ltd, which belongs to the real estate entrepreneur and financier Ching Chiat Kwong, who plannned a €1.3bn property development on the land.
Ching had envisaged a project on an even larger scale than the one he carried out a decade ago in east London, the Royal Wharf development, with its commercial spaces and 3,385 residential units. The Venetian deal, however, was to fall through in 2018 when he discovered how toxic the land actually was.
But as a prelude to the ambitious Pili deal, Brugnaro offered Oxley Holdings two historic Venetian palaces, which have since been turned into hotels.
In 2016, Immobiliare Veneziana (IVE), a company controlled by the town council, announced the auction by sealed bids of the 15th- and 16th-century Palazzo Donà, formerly a municipal office, a few minutes walk from St Mark’s Square, in Campo Santa Maria Formosa.
This is where Boraso comes into the story. He was appointed councillor for mobility and heritage in the first Brugnaro cabinet in 2015. That same year, together with his wife, he set up the limited liability company Stella Consulting, a real estate consultancy. It was he who negotiated on behalf of the council with Ching’s representative Luis Lotti and, as reported in an email also quoted in the Report TV programme, Lotti assured Ching, “There will be no problem in awarding it to you. I met the mayor’s right-hand man and he confirmed it”. In fact, Oxley Holdings was the only bidder for Palazzo Donà, an unusual state of affairs for Venice, where historic palaces in good locations are at a premium.
Then, in 2017, it was the turn of the largely 18th-century Palazzo Poerio Papadopoli, until recently the headquarters of the city police. This is conveniently close to the road access into Venice, Piazzale Roma, and it was being offered to Ching as the second entry ticket into the Venetian scene before the Pili operation.
In 2009 Boraso had already put the palazzo up for sale on behalf of the council for €14m. At that point, permissible uses for the 1,885 sq. m building were listed as housing, offices, museums and exhibition spaces, and libraries, with the option of opening a bar, shop or restaurant on the ground floor. Now, however, Borasa lowered the price to €10.8m, this time with the council’s permission to turn the palazzo into a hotel, and with Insula, one of the council’s subsidiaries, given the job of designing its new function.
The tender gets announced and who makes an offer? Once again, only Ching's Oxley Holdings, with an irrevocable bid of €10.8m after having asked for a discount. There had, however, been 22 expressions of interest in the purchase of a potential hotel near Piazzale Roma such as Palazzo Poerio Papadopoli, according to Claudio Vanin of the Treviso-based company Sama Global. This was involved, in collaboration with Oxley Holdings, the mayor’s Porta di Venezia company and especially Derek Donadini, head of the council’s cabinet, in the plans and negotiations for the Pili operation.
Boraso’s company Stella Consulting received two cheques for its consultancy work. The first, for €36,000, is dated 20 December 2017, six days after the sealed bids were opened and Palazzo Poerio Papadopoli was awarded to Ching. The second, another €36,000, is dated 19 March 2018. The cheques were drawn up by FALC, a real estate company created by Ching’s man, Lotti, in collaboration with Vanin. Boraso admits that he was paid, but denies the connection with Palazzo Poerio Papadopoli. The Guardia di Finanza are not convinced, however, hence his arrest, while Ching and Lotti have been formally warned that they are under investigation
So far as the Pili €1.3bn investment operation is concerned, there were plans for a large hotel facing the lagoon, a shopping centre with covered parking, several office towers, a luxury residence for the elderly, detached houses overlooking the lagoon, a marina with club house, and a 10,000-seat sports hall for the Reyer Venezia basketball team that belongs to Mayor Brugnaro.
This operation started at the beginning of 2016, with repeated meetings and outline planning, and finally collapsed in mid-2018, when Ching discovered the very high cost of cleaning up the polluted land. Sama Global, which oversaw the development of the project, and its contact person Vanin, have long been claiming over €15m in fees from Oxley Holdings for the feasibility study and outline design of the project, which also involved the well-known Venetian architect Tobia Scarpa.
On the basis of a dense network of intercepted emails, two of Brugnaro’s closest collaborators in the council, Donadini and Morris Ceron, are now under investigation, as also the lawyer Roberta Crivellaro in his capacity as the person who oversaw the setting up of a blind trust in which Brugnaro vested the Pili land and the potential deal. Now Brugnaro is under investigation over the degree to which he did or did not stand back from the blind trust operation.
The Pili deal may have fallen through, but the investigation by the Venetian judiciary continues—fishing in the “swamp”. What has already emerged, however, proves yet again that Brugnaro’s council has no interest in helping Venice retain a varied economy, nor in assisting its citizens by protecting the stock of private housing. Rather, its actions have accelerated the rush towards making it a a purely tourist city, as described already in 2021 by The Art Newspaper.