Manipulative wife convicted of sentimental fraud: elderly entrepreneur stripped of assets

Hundreds of thousands of euros donated, a Porsche, jewellery and trips to exotic places. All on the wave of a senile and 'naive' feeling, which drove a 90-year-old widowed Roman businessman to give even the company shares and insurance policies, revoked from his three children - defended in the case against the woman by the lawyer Valerio Vallefuoco - to the woman he believed to be the woman of his life and who cost him a large part of his assets amounting to around10 million eur. A 55-year-old lady who had 'initiated' the elderly man into unknown, hitherto unknown pleasures of life. Only to change radically after the lightning wedding, with a yes pronounced on the wave of what, for him, was a great passion.

The awakening from the dream of love, for the elderly lover, was abrupt: while he was hospitalised to detoxify from massive doses of psycho-pharmaceuticals, he had been ousted, with a quick change of lock, from his 300-square-metre house - to the point of having to find shelter in a hospice - and had also lost the shares in the company that, driven by chemistry, not only feelings but also the pills - which he was given despite the heart disease he suffered from - he had given to his 'other half'.

 The judges of the Court of Rome have filed the grounds of the sentence by which the woman was sentenced to two years for sentimental fraud, an offence that falls within the scope of fraud (Article 640 of the Criminal Code). And which was well defined by the Cassazione in its ruling 25165/2019. On that occasion, it was a young man, into whose net a venerable lady had fallen, who had ended up in the judges' sights. The Supreme Court, in affirming sentimental fraud, clarified its contours. "The fraud is not appreciable because of the deception concerning the agent's feelings as opposed to those of the victim," reads the ruling, "but because the lie about one's own feelings is in tune with a whole situation designed to make the victim exchange the false for the true by operating on the psyche of the passive subject.

The judge must verify the sequence indicated by the legislator: artifice or deception - induction into error - act of deception - pecuniary damage and unjust profit, "emphasising in particular that, for the purposes of identifying the fraudulent conduct, it is necessary to ascertain the deceptive capacity of the artifice or deception and the causal link between the deception and the error of the victim who - the judges write - affected in her volitional sphere by false motives, determines herself to a certain asset choice that she would not otherwise have made". In this specific case, the elderly woman had convinced herself to open the purse strings, enticed by promises of a life together.

The Court of Cassation specified that 'it is not intended to affirm the criminal relevance of deceptive conduct concerning the feelings felt, inducing in itself to perform prejudicial dispositive acts, but rather the unlawfulness of conduct that exploited the weakness of the victim, in this case involved in a romantic relationship, and gave rise to false motives, determining the disposer's choice of assets'.