A company owned by one of Europe’s most popular footballers has made more than €500,000 from renting a run-down office building to Rome city council as housing for homeless people.
Under the terms of the deal, the council is paying a firm owned by the Italian superstar Francesco Totti almost twice the going market rate. The arrangement was approved by an acquaintance of Totti who is to go on trial this year on unrelated charges of corruption.
Luca Odevaine, a senior local authority official, is accused of being a pivotal figure in a web of corrupt links between the Rome council and an organised crime syndicate headed by a former neo-fascist gunman.
There is no suggestion the deal between Totti’s firm and the council is illegal. And, since the footballer does not wield executive powers in the company, he may have been unaware of the contents of the agreement when it was signed. But several factors have made it intensely controversial.
The origins of the affair go back to 2005 when the council approved the creation of a network of temporary housing assistance centres.
Documents reproduced in a recently published book, I re di Roma (the king of Rome), by Lirio Abbate and Marco Lillo, show that two years later Odevaine was made chairman of a committee tasked with deciding on offers of suitable buildings for the scheme.
Totti and the official already knew one another. When Odevaine’s father died in 2005, Totti, his wife and his personal trainer and assistant put their names to a notice in the daily L’Unita expressing their condolences.
Among the offers Odevaine’s committee received was one from Immobiliare Dieci, part of a chain of companies controlled by Totti and all bearing names that refer to the No 10 shirt he wears on the field. His firm proposed the upper storeys of a converted office block in Tor Tre Teste, a dormitory suburb on the desolate outskirts of Rome, and proposed an annual rent of almost €1.3m (£930,000).
The building has 35 apartments covering 2,430 square metres, so the suggested rent was equivalent to almost €44 per square metre per month. The committee replied that it would pay €15 per square metre per month in rent. With VAT and a recent 6% increase, the total comes to more than €19 per square metre per month.
Yet, according to the specialist property website Immobiliare.it, rents in the 00155 post code area in which the building is situated are among the lowest in Rome at around €10 per square metre per month. In fact, the only parts of the capital where rents exceed €19 are in the city’s historic centre. The website’s estimates suggest the council could put the homeless into accommodation overlooking the Colosseum for much the same rent it is handing over to Totti’s company.
In addition to the rent, the local authority is paying more than €350,000 a year for services including taking care of the common areas, 24-hour porterage, maintenance and the cleaning of apartments when there is a change of tenant.
But Elisa Ferri, who lives in the building with her husband and three children, says conditions are frequently squalid. “A pipe burst in the floor above and it took more than a month to get a plumber to come round,” she said. In the meantime, paint had peeled off the ceiling, water dripped on to her children’s beds and mould formed in several areas.
Earlier this year, the 33-year-old showed the damage to a video reporter from the newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano.
Ferri, who said she earned €700 a month as a cleaner and carer, told the Guardian the office block was never intended to be inhabited around the clock and that it was plagued by cockroaches. “We have asked several times for disinfestation, but without getting any response,” she said. “I find the cockroaches more repulsive than the mould.”
The Roma captain declined to respond to questions put to him by the Guardian through his personal trainer and assistant. In March, he also refused to give a response to a reporter from the television programme Servizio Pubblico who asked him about his relationship with Odevaine. A representative said merely: “Totti is a footballer. His professional advisers take care of these things.”
Prosecutors claim Odevaine received €5,000 a month to procure lucrative public contracts for an organised crime syndicate, which – Italy’s highest court has ruled – used mafia-like methods in its operations. In March, Odevaine voluntarily testified to the prosecutors. Reports based on his lawyer’s account of the closed-door proceedings quoted Odevaine as saying the money was compensation for his role as the gang’s “facilitator” and “problem tackler” in the local authority.
The charismatic Totti, 38, has captained AS Roma continuously since 1998, becoming the most prolific goalscorer in the history of the club. A revered figure in his native city – his nicknames include that of Il re di Roma or “the king of Rome” – he has patronised many good causes. He is a goodwill ambassador for the Italian branch of Unicef.
When the mayor of the Italian capital, Ignazio Marino, was asked about his council’s dealings with the footballer’s companies in March, he replied: “Totti in Rome is untouchable, because Totti is Totti. I want him to carry on winning and scoring …”
Ownership of the property has since been transferred to Immobiliare Ten, a wholly owned subsidiary of Immobiliare Dieci, which is in turn owned by a firm called Numberten Srl. Totti has an 83.19% stake in Numberten Srl, with the remaining share divided between Totti’s mother, Fiorella Marrozzini, and his brother, Riccardo, who is also Immobiliare Ten’s chief executive. In the four years to the end of 2014 Immobiliare Ten made after-tax profits of €573,996.
