Financial and Banking Crimes

Financial and banking institutions may incur various forms of criminal liability in the performance of their activities. Financial and banking crimes, provided for respectively by Legislative Decree no. 58/1998 (Consolidated Law on Finance – T.U.F.) and Legislative Decree no. 385/1993 (Consolidated Banking Law – T.U.B.), are aimed at protecting the proper functioning of the financial market, which is increasingly labyrinthine, and the correct exercise of banking activity.

The system established by the legislator is based on the logic of the so-called dual track, according to which the perpetrator of the offences is subject simultaneously to administrative and criminal sanctions. This mechanism is widely criticized in legal scholarship because it is in tension with the fundamental guarantee principle of substantive ne bis in idem, which requires the avoidance of duplications of sanctions against a person who has committed a single unlawful act, and which today finds supranational recognition in Article 4 of the Additional Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

The firm has acquired solid expertise in this field, especially with reference to the most delicate cases of unlawful exercise of banking and financial activity, unlawful issuance of electronic money, unlawful provision of payment services, unlawful exercise of the activity of financial agent, obstruction of the exercise of the functions of public supervisory authorities, abuse of inside information (so-called insider trading) and market manipulation (so-called “aggiotaggio” or market abuse).