Supreme Court: obligation to notify suspended driver until conclusion of infringement appeals

There is no obligation to disclosethe data of those who were driving the car - which ended up in the sights of the offender and resulted in a fine against which an appeal was lodged - until the possible objection is settled. And only in the case of a negative outcome will the 60 days period be triggered to disclose the identity of the driver. The Court of Cassation thus gave the car owner the upper hand, forcing him to pay a penalty of 301 euro, including 15 euro in costs, compared to the expected range from 286 euro to 1.142 euro, for those who do not respect the 60-day deadline from the notification of the offence to make the 'guilty' driver identifiable and thus cut the points from their driving licence. The judges on the merits had moved on this front.

But the Supreme Court disregards the thesis asserted in the contested judgment. The judges of legitimacy state, in fact, that the duty to givethe driver's personal details by theowner of the vehicle is triggered only "when the judicial or administrative proceedings brought against the report relating to the previous offence are concluded, since no obligation in such terms arises before then. It follows that, in the event of an unfavourable outcome - reads the order - for the claimant in the aforesaid proceedings,the administration is obliged to issuea new invitation to the obliged party, from the notification of which the sixty days to fulfil the obligations referred to in the aforesaid provision commence; whereas, in the event of a favourable outcome (with cancellation of the assessment report), the prerequisitefor the configuration of the violation is no longer met.

The opposition therefore stops the clock for the purposes of calculating the sixty days. In fact, the Court of Cassation specifies that, without prejudice to the instantaneous nature of the infringement contemplated by the rule and the public protection pursued, the contested orientation must be disregarded, because it sets off the deadline by which the owner of the vehicle is required to communicate the data of the request addressed to the owner by the authority, completely disregardingthe necessary correlation between the opposition against the report and the actual occurrence of the notification obligation imposed by the Road Traffic Act. Circumstances that must be taken into account, since one cannot ignore the outcome of the opposition.