On the other side of the Atlantic, the legal battle between RCS and the American fund Blackstone over the sale of the property in via Solferino, in Milan, the historic headquarters of the newspaper Corriere della Sera, which took place in 2013, resumes. US fund lawyers formally filed the request to the judges of the New York Supreme Court to amend, and then reunify, the two originally separate damages lawsuits filed, the first against RCS and the second against its president Urbano Cairo. The deadlines for amending the procedure, in fact, expired on 30 June.
The compensation claim, quantified by the lawyers of the Kirkland & Ellis firm, amounts to a total of 600 million dollars (equal to over 505 million euros). In detail, it concerns 300 million dollars for the non-resale of the property to Allianz and another 300 million in related damages. A move that comes a month and a half after the outcome of the Milan arbitration award which rejected RCS’s claims against Blackstone.
According to the arbitrators, in fact, there was no irregularity in the contract that led RCS to sell the property to the American fund. In the award, which is 80 pages long, we read that “it is not allowed (…) to recognize in the behavior of Blackstone (and, for it, Kryalos) anything that appears unquestionably contrary to (…) the duties of correctness and good faith “. The considerations of the three arbitrators did not “bring to light anything other than the unfolding of a commercial negotiation between performing subjects, promoted by the selling party and in the context of which the buying party has legitimately tried to achieve the most advantageous conditions for it, without any evidence of undue pressure on the counterpart having emerged, as a result of a competitive procedure that (…) it would be arbitrary to consider fictitious ».
There will therefore be no compensation from Blackstone. Indeed, the Milanese award has reopened the path of the American lawsuit with which the fund asked for damages in Cairo for the non-transfer of the building to Allianz, blocked by the publisher’s legal initiatives.