A doubly heavy sentence with which the Liguria Tar accepted the appeal which effectively blocks the restyling project of the Old Port of Sanremo.
Both because it is a concession with a total value of around 600 million, and because the procedures followed by the Municipality of Sanremo and by the mayor Alberto Biancheri for an intervention of primary importance for the city are called into question.
The appeal had been filed by one of the companies that had presented an offer to obtain assignment of the works (approximately 70 million), Porto San Francesco owned by the Sanremo entrepreneur Roberto Piras.
The appeal signed by the lawyers Daniela Anselmi and Giulio Bertone was accepted by the Tar judges who also sentenced the Municipality and Porto Sanremo, awarded the contract, to pay the court costs. The reasons for the sentence will be known in a few days. In their appeal, the lawyers had censured the fact “that the Municipality with its own deeds had excluded the project financing proposal put forward by the Porto San Francesco Company, in disregard of the principles of a level playing field, selecting the proposal of the Porto di Sanremo Company and allowing only to the latter the possibility over time to integrate and adapt the respective proposal, thus preventing the appellant Company from benefiting from the same possibility in disregard of the rules of equal treatment, to which the administration itself was bound by itself”.
The ruling is also important for another reason. The winning company of the comparative procedure decided by the Municipality is Porto di Sanremo which, after a series of changes of ownership, for some years has been in the hands of the Hyphen Resources fund (which controls it through the companies Rb Marina and Rb Italy) of the British brothers of origin Indian Simon and Davids Reuben who own a fortune estimated by Forbes at around 14 billion dollars.
The Reubens in Sanremo had already taken over the majority of Portosole from Beatrice Cozzi Parodi and the two companies are managed by two trusted managers of the British billionaires with residence in Montecarlo, Eileen Marie Sawyer and Gianluca Petrera.
The Reubens have gone shopping in Italy in recent years in the tourism sector acquiring the Baglioni hotel and the Palazzo Experimental in Venice, the La Palma Hotel in Capri, the De Paris Hotel in Sanremo and in Rome the former headquarters of the Banca d’ Italy in Parliament square. And then the Rizzo – De Carlini shipping company of Torre del Greco.
The Porto Vecchio operation, which seemed to have started by now, represents a serious stumbling block for the British holding company. Naturally, an appeal to the Council of State of the Municipality and of the Porto di Sanremo company is almost obvious, but first the reasons must be read.