Milan court keeps US consulate builder under oversight in labour probe

A Milan court kept the Italian arm of Caddell Construction under judicial control as investigators pressed a labour probe at the site of the new U.S. consulate, a project meant to project American diplomacy in northern Italy. The judge said evidence pointed to workers recruited from India being forced into exhausting shifts, paid too little, denied proper safety protections and left under constant threat of dismissal. The ruling went further, treating the alleged mistreatment not as a one-off lapse but as a possible corporate practice.

The court’s decision preserved an emergency measure first imposed on May 29 and placed a judicial administrator alongside company management. That administrator will report to the court every three months, a sign that authorities intend to keep tight oversight while the investigation continues. The site itself will not be shut, and the administrator’s task is to regularize workers and monitor compliance rather than halt construction.

The case has already reached into Caddell’s leadership structure. Prosecutors arrested the head of the company’s Italian branch, Ulas Demir, and one of the supervisors of the Indian workers. Demir was stopped at Bergamo’s Orio al Serio airport as he allegedly tried to leave Italy. The allegations have turned a high-profile diplomatic project into a test of whether labour rules are enforced with the same force inside marquee foreign-backed developments as they are in Italy’s other sectors.

The consulate contract was awarded by the U.S. State Department on October 14, 2021 to Caddell Construction, with SHoP Architects as architect. The project covers roughly 10 acres and is intended to support U.S.-Italy diplomatic and commercial ties. The State Department had said at the groundbreaking that the new facility would be finished in 2025, but the completion target later slipped to 2028. The contract was worth nearly $210 million, and construction began in 2022.

The site also carries historical weight. The U.S. government acquired the property in 2009, and the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations describes it as the former National Firing Range, with elements of the site’s legacy preserved in the design. That backdrop makes the labour probe more stark: a symbol of American statecraft in Milan is now being run under court supervision because investigators say workers on the job may have been exploited.

Caddell says it is cooperating with local and judicial authorities and has opened its own inquiry. The U.S. State Department says U.S. law enforcement is working in full cooperation with Italian authorities and that the government does not tolerate labour exploitation.