The takeover in Sardinia is secreted in a corporate chessboard that rivals the more mysterious tax havens of the Cayman Islands. Hundreds of plots, limited companies and tiny companies, crossroads of business and high-flying relationships, not always free from shadows and investigations. It's not just the prevailing wind that breaks on the plains and hills of Sardinia that needs to be intercepted. To put pen to paper there are high-sounding projects, capable of bringing in millions of euros like a flooded river, from the slopes of Ossi, in the province of Sassari, to the promised lands of Marmilla and Campidano. The latest assault on the millennial history of Sardinia is the classic straw that overflows a business jar already overflowing with wind turbines and incentives, a great feast behind the Sardinians planned in the silence of those who should have declared war on the invasion of imposing steel skyscrapers, all leaning towards the Sardinian wind, to shade nuraghes and giants' tombs.

Wind Climbing

The pieces on wind power climbing at the Nuragic Palace of Barumini, revealed in the investigation published yesterday by the Unione Sarda, are "enriched", hour after hour, with disturbing details capable of revealing an imposing system. From the lands of Padania, from Milan and Verona, corporate castles and improbable undertakings are in fact being planned to surround every corner of Sardinia with wind turbines, up to colonizing it at the foot of its most ancient civilization, the Nuragic one. The pattern that emerges is armored: in just under a year, between March 2021 and 2022, the Chamber of Commerce of Milan, Monza, Brianza, Lodi registered a multitude of companies with a fixed denominator: Sardinia. On the sidelines the keyword: wind, the wind. Infatuated by the idea of shading, with impressive rotating blades, none other than the proscenium of "Su Nuraxi", they dedicated themselves to Campidano as if it were their land, to be shattered far and wide with projects presented as a slow and inexorable advance , in concentric circles, first wide and now narrower and narrower.

Chessboards at the table

From the data in our possession, a precise scheme emerges in the presentation of projects not only in the ministerial context, but also with regional procedures. It is not, therefore, an episodic event. It is symptomatic that Sardinia has been divided into at least seven areas, meaning that the companies are apparently and fiscally different even if they all converge in a unitary project, with a single man in command. A name capable of relationships without pleasantries, with politicians, investment banks, financial funds and some not always high-ranking acquaintances.

Wind holding

Let's take the case of Campidano and Marmilla. The projects presented and attributable to the same holding company are officially four: two deposited last week at the Ministry of the Environment, those directly around the Nuragic Palace of Barumini, one contiguous in May of last year and yet another emerging from the maze of the procedures regional with a project of seven blades to be driven close to the other three planned wind farms. The projects around the Barumini Palace were presented by the "Grv Wind Sardegna n.6", for a total of 26 blades, to which must be added the 7 presented, always contiguous to Su Nuraxi, by the company "Grv Wind Sardegna n. 7”, located in the Villanovafranca area, and now the fourth project, strangely sized to avoid the ministerial procedure, presented to the regional environmental assessment just last year. On the field for the procedure in charge of the Sardinian Region they deployed the "Grv Wind Sardegna n. 4”.

Single-owner

Three apparently different companies, at least fiscally, but all attributable to a single subject, for four projects all positioned in physical and territorial continuity with each other. Therefore, a real wind chessboard positioned in a fractional way, but clearly functional to a very specific design: to get your hands on the wind and on the land of Sardinia, in this specific case in the link between Marmilla, Campidano and Trexenta. But that's not all: the holding company, headquartered in via Durini in Milan, but thinking heart in the land of Romeo and Juliet, in ancient Verona, also deployed the fourth wind company, the "Grv Wind Sardegna n.3”, which at the end of 2021 presented yet another wind project to the Ministry of the Environment to attack the sky of Ossi, on the outskirts of Sassari. The interests of the latter period, however, confirm the preference for the crossroads between Barumini, Villanovafranca, Guasila and Samatzai.

40 blades, 231 megawatts

In that area, "Gr Value", the leader and owner of 100% of these matryoshka companies, has in fact presented projects to install as many as 40 wind turbines over 200 meters high, for over 231 megawatts of electrical power, one of the largest wind farms on the island, declared split, but which in reality will be a single whole. To these must be added, always on that side, presented by other multinationals, other projects, always split up, capable of dramatically expanding the landscape devastation that would be dramatically worsened if even only a part of these plans went through.

Past "heavy"

So far the scenario in the field, the one once destined for thriving agricultural cultivation and today, however, a bargaining chip for "slicers" of wind and business from afar, with a chain of relationships marked over time. The history of this climb in Sardinia, in fact, has its roots in the year 2006, when a Veronese "doge" assumes the role of Chairman of the Board of Directors of a very marginal provincial company, in fact Venetian, but with name and surname totally Sardinian, the "Eolo Tempio Pausania". The rest is history without adjectives. With joints and contacts to make the veins of the wrists tremble.

"Light Poles"

Reports recalled in the judicial and journalistic chronicles immediately after the capture of Matteo Messina Denaro, who was an honest supporter-profiteer of wind power, as Totò Riina himself recounted within the walls of the hard prison. The Chief of Chiefs had been explicit: «This Mr. Messina is obsessed with light poles. Always these bullshit poles » . The reference was to the wind power business that the former godfather, who ended up in prison in recent weeks, pursued as a mantra through trusted and undercover men, as far as possible. For many pentiti, as emerges from various procedural strands, the financing of Matteo Messina Denaro's thirty-year absence would have been Vito Nicastri, a former electrician from Alcamo, with whom we have repeatedly dealt with in the wind farms in Sardinia. Not really a nobody, so much so that the anti-mafia came to seize 1.3 billion euros from him, considered by many to be the mafia boss's safe.

The “king” of wind power

Through the corporate relations of the "king of wind power", Vito Nicastri, the business that the boss of Cosa Nostra cultivated in the wind power sector would have reached Verona. The DDA of Palermo and the Dia of Padua had made them re-emerge, with pizzini and interceptions. In 2011, the then prefect of Verona, Perla Stancari, severed that contact with the Veneto and the collateral and direct environments. Four striking anti-mafia disqualifications that have come back into vogue in recent days shortly after the arrest of Matteo Messina Denaro. To be affected by the prefectural actions were four companies receiving public funding for 90 million euros.

Judgments without appeal

Provisions later armored by two confirmatory sentences, the first by the Tar and the last, in 2015, by the Council of State. It is on the basis of those sentences that the ties with Sardinia, the wind operations of yesterday and today resurface. What emerges from the past is an intricate system that would have made it possible to control a company, which was based at the same address as the other companies involved, in Piazza Cittadella in Verona. It is here that the Judges endorse the prefectural provision arguing in no uncertain terms that the risk of possible mafia infiltration within Eolo Tempio Pausania srl is considered concrete and current due to the deemed commonality of interests between this and Vito Nicastri, contiguous to mafia circles ».

Eolo, between Tempio and Verona

The "Eolo Tempio Pausania" changed its name in 2011. However, it had been sold by “Veronagest”. The "subsidiaries" involved in the disqualifications of the prefect of Verona referred to the latter. Dia's men had ascertained that previously "the sole shareholder of Eolo Tempio Pausania of Verona appeared to be a company based abroad" and with shareholdings in offshore countries. According to the magistrates it was "a complex intertwining of corporate events, headed by Veronagest and ultimately attributable to the same figure of Nicastri" . In 2015, the Council of State confirmed the validity of the disclosure adopted by the prefect of Verona: «Eolo Tempio Pausania, like other companies and, among these, the parent company Eolica Maridiana, had been a pawn in a wider mechanism skilfully managed by Nicastri and aimed at controlling the wind energy sector in Sicily, in which a political and a mafia party also emerged: the former was responsible for providing administrative authorizations for the construction of a wind farm behind the promise of bribes from of the companies concerned, and the second to authorize such installations in its territory of control, upon payment of bribes, so as to be able to take advantage of state and European subsidies for the production of clean energy ».

Judicial confirmations

The lawyers explain: «the connection of Eolo Tempio Pausania with the galaxy of entities attributable to Nicastri, at least until 8 March 2011, appears undoubted» with a sure mechanism «which had its director in Vito Nicastri, found to be at the helm of a real holding company of 34 companies, all directly and unequivocally attributable to him" .

Nuraxi & planes

Last note, with respect to the events of the present day: Gr Value, 100% owner of the corporate castle that is climbing the Campidano, from the Reggia to the Marmilla, is in turn 100% owned by "Grv Investimenti", which, according to documents in our possession, is 100% owned by Franco Bogoni, the owner of Veronagest itself and of what was once «Eolo Tempio Pausania srl». According to the documents of the Palermo anti-mafia prosecutor's office, in April 2007 he was the one who paid for a flight on a private jet to Tunis with a "heavy" company on board: Gioacchino Lo Presti of Alcamo (investigated among other things for having favored the fugitive by Alessandro Gambino), by Vito Nicastri and Filippo Inzerillo. Also on board was the Veronese, Franco Bogoni, wind energy entrepreneur, the de facto owner of the projects presented in front of the Barumini Palace.

Procedural documents

In the records of the trial, still ongoing on recent and past events, it appears that that flight to Tunis cost 25,000 euros, with the plane of a company based in the "Catullo" airport of Villafranca di Verona, with an invoice paid by a Bogoni company, Veronagest SA, based in the tax haven of Luxembourg. He, Franco Bogoni, is not being investigated in the affair. Now, in fact, he is in charge of placing wind turbines in Barumini, in front of Su Nuraxi. The wind shadow in Sardinia.

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