Financial and Banking Criminal Law

The Firm has well-established experience in providing both preventive and litigation assistance to Italian and foreign credit institutions and to listed companies on issues of banking and financial markets criminal law.

The results obtained in some of the most important criminal proceedings on the national scene have made the Firm a point of reference for the leading operators in the financial sector, who rely on the Firm’s professionals for advisory work and criminal defence in relation to the offences set out in the Consolidated Law on Finance and in the Consolidated Banking Act.

In addition to the training and constant updating of its professionals, the Firm benefits from the collaboration of accredited technical experts, thanks to whom it guarantees the highest standards of assistance in the trials in which it takes on the defence mandate.

The Firm’s work covers the entire spectrum of banking and financial offences: unauthorised collection of savings and provision of investment services, obstruction of the supervisory authorities’ functions, market abuse, usury, as well as the sanctioning aspects connected with proceedings initiated by the Bank of Italy and Consob, with particular care devoted to coordinating the criminal defence with the defence in parallel administrative proceedings.

Alongside criminal offences, the Consolidated Law on Finance sets out an articulated system of administrative violations, ranging from market abuse to breaches of issuers’ disclosure obligations, of the rules of conduct in the provision of investment services and of the duties of cooperation with the supervisory authority. These are sanctions which European and national case law regards as falling within the “criminal sphere”: defence in sanctioning proceedings therefore requires the same rigour as criminal defence.

The Firm assists issuers, intermediaries and corporate officers at every stage of proceedings before Consob — from inspections and hearings, to submissions in reply to the statement of objections, through to opposition before the Court of Appeal and appeal to the Court of Cassation — taking care, in “double-track” cases, of coordination with the criminal defence and of ne bis in idem issues. Our assistance extends to the assessment of alternative means of settling the proceedings, starting with the commitments mechanism introduced by the Capital Markets Act.