The unstoppable rise to success of Lanfranco Cirillo, “Putin’s architect”

Lhe first time we hear about it is last August. The story of Lanfranco Ivanovich Cirillo (64 years old), an Italian entrepreneur who is very popular with Putin and his entourage, collides with the Italian justice system. The Prosecutor of Brescia charges him with a series of tax crimes, Cirillo threatens battle through his lawyers and proclaims himself innocent. Meanwhile the seizure of assets for 140 million euros was ordered, including villas and works of art originals by Picasso, Cezanne, Kandinsky, De Chirico and Fontana and jewelsthe. But also a yacht, the architect’s personal helicopter and 670 thousand euros in cash found in the house. Yesterday, the entrepreneur from Treviso, from the fifty-first floor of Imperia, the maxi skyscraper in Moscow City of which he owns 4,000 m2, in connection with ANSA he ruled out returning on February 23 for the first hearing of the process and pronounced his j’accuse against Italian justice. «I’m not going back to Italy. I was told that I wouldn’t even be able to take a plane to come to Italy, because an Interpol mandate has been issued to me, even a red notice, normally reserved for terrorists and drug traffickers”.

To understand the unprecedented rise to power of the unknown surveyor from Vittorio Veneto who proclaimed himself architect of Putin, we need to go back forty years and reconstruct a story that intertwines at least two conflicts (Kwait and Iraq) and arrives directly at the Kremlin.

The son of a career soldier who arrived in Vittorio Veneto in the 1970s, Cirillo’s parable began around the 1980s, with a company that produced office furniture. Six years later the sole proprietorship became a company: Lanfranco went into business founding Elleffe in Cappella Maggiore. With the outbreak of the Gulf War in the early 1990s, the surveyor from Treviso moved to Kuwait and in a few years arrives in Moscow. In the Russian capital, Cyril quickly made a name for himself in the field of interior renovation, but also signs the design of a farm in the Crimea. His rise seems unstoppable: the main godparents in the Moscow world are Vagit Alekperov, president of the oil giant Lukoil, and Elena Baturina, entrepreneur and wife of Jurij Luzhkov, powerful former mayor of Moscow. Thus, in 2005, together with Ziad Manasir, a Jordanian builder, Cirillo founded the Stroygazkomplekt studio, the atelier loved by the oligarchs. It is Alexei Navalnythe main opponent of the tsar, to name Cyril for the first time as builder of Dvorez Putina, the so-called Putin’s Dacha, a pharaonic project with three heliports, casino, private bay, amphitheater, wellness center in Gelendshik. In 2014, Putin himself granted him Russian citizenship by presidential decree. Lanfranco becomes Ivanovich Cirillo: on his official profile he proclaims himself a Muscovite architect of Italian origin. And his business also crosses Dubai and the Emirates.

In Italy, however, he has more than sporadic relationships: the luxurious villa in the province of Brescia where the searches and seizures were carried out last summer remains in Roncadelle. While his brothers still live in Vittorio Veneto: the first, Fabrizio, works in the branch of office furniture, while Francesco is an esteemed physical education teacher, athletics coach and ski instructor. And between the pages of an opaque story that mixes luxury, power, privilege and politics, and also sees it involved Lanfranco’s wife (investigated together with her husband) there is a father Cyril, who had to face, in 2019, the death of his daughter Elisabetta, struck down by a tumor at the age of 33. The woman had shared the discovery and the unstoppable course of the disease in the blog «Lisa in the world».

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