No VAT payable in Trieste; independence campaigners rejected

The case has been concluded in the Court of Cassation, with the confirmation that the ordinary court had no jurisdiction whatsoever and the order that the (numerous) appellants pay 8,000 euros in legal costs , the case brought by the International Provisional Representative of the Free Territory of Trieste against the Presidency of the Council of Ministers (as well as the Revenue Agency, the Ministry of Economy and Finance and Customs) to establish that the current Italian legal system does not permit the application of VAT to the former Free Territory established at the end of the Second World War, from 1947 to 1954. This decision follows that taken on a similar matter and concerning the same applicants by the Joint Divisions in judgment 8600/2022.

In yesterday’s Order No. 23624, the judges of the Court of Cassation, having rejected eight of the nine grounds of appeal put forward by the lawyers representing the body established in 2015 on the grounds that they were ‘entirely unrelated to the content of the contested decision’, focused solely on the first ground, according to which the subject of the challenge is not the Italia Government’s right to exercise sovereign powers in what the appellants define as the current Free Territory of Trieste, but rather the claim to exercise those powers on a basis other than the sub-mandate of provisional civil administration entrusted to it by the US and British Governments, the former administrators of the territory. In this context, it was argued that the imposition of VAT would be unlawful because it would breach international obligations.

In this context, according to the Court of Cassation, what is essentially being sought is ‘a review of the structure of territorial boundaries of the Italian State, in order to infer the generalised illegality of a tax levy on a territorial area over which the Italian Republic would not – in theory – have full sovereignty. And with regard to such a claim, aimed at denying the sovereignty of the Italian State over a portion of its own territory – the Court concludes – it must be reiterated that there is an complete lack of jurisdiction on the part of the ordinary courts’.