Veneto banks, all Consob sanctions confirmed

There is no discount on the Consob sanctions for the wrongful acts to the detriment of parmiers committed at Veneto Banca and Banca Popolare di Vicenza in the early years of last decade.

With four twin ordinances of the Second Civil Section - pres. Milena Falaschi, rel. Valeria Pirari - under the rubric 24238 to 24241 and filed yesterday, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the coexistence of the Tuf's administrative sanctions with the (para)criminal ones of market manipulation - thus not generating the bis in idem - and reaffirmed the very 'vertical' duties of the members of the Board of Auditors.

The appeals had been filed by the 2011-2014 Chief Executive Officer of Veneto Banca, then General Manager until 2015; by a member of the Board of Directors of the same bank; by a member of the Board of Statutory Auditors of Popolare di Vicenza; and by a member of the Board of Directors of the same bank, all of whom had been fined between EUR 30,000 and EUR 140,000 in different ways.

The sample of violations of the Consolidated Law on Finance contested as a result of Consob's investigation was extremely wide-ranging: from the failure to adopt adequate procedures to conduct 'contrary to correctness, diligence and transparency in the assessment of the appropriateness of transactions'; from irregularities in the 'transfers between private individuals' of Veneto Banca shares and the loans granted to customers for the purchase of shares of their own issue, to having behaved in a manner contrary to fairness, diligence and transparency in the management of customer orders'. Again, as far as Popolare di Vicenza was concerned, the 2014 capital increase was in the crosshairs, for "having rendered information that turned out to be untrue following inspections", together with the "persistence of a situation of significant failure to process requests for the sale of shares of the bank".

On yet another occasion, the Supreme Court has returned to the subject of the (alleged) afflictiveness of the administrative sanctions of Articles 190 et seq. of the Tuf with a view to having the charges already punished in the criminal law fall. For the Court, however, it is not possible to make such an equation 'in terms of type, severity, pecuniary and personal incidence, with those imposed for market manipulation pursuant to Article 187 et seq. of the Tuf, so that they do not have the substantially criminal nature, nor do they pose a problem of compatibility with the guarantees reserved for criminal trials by Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, to the effects, in particular, of the violation of the ne bis in idem", also because "the assessment of the economic afflictiveness of a sanction cannot in any case be carried out in totally abstract and absolute terms, but must necessarily be related to the regulatory context in which the sanctioning provision is inserted and to the legal good protected".