Ateneo - UPO

The course aims to expose the subject of commercial criminal law, a complementary sector of Italian criminal law. Of particular interest to the subject are the so-called corporate, bankruptcy and tax offences and those that, more broadly, belong to corporate governance.

Enrico Mario Ambrosetti Enrico Mezzetti Mauro Ronco
Diritto penale dell'impresa, Zanichelli, last edition

The course aims to train future business lawyers, through the mastery of business risk monitoring and prevention tools, as well as the ability to be able to resolve complex criminal law cases in commercial matters.

It is required to have taken either Criminal Law I or Institutions of Criminal Law.

Lectures and exercises on practical cases drawn from the most recent case law on topical issues

Oral exams

The course proposes a specialised treatment of ‘corporate criminal law’, as part of the broader system of the so-called ‘economic criminal law’ which, with respect to the cases analytically dealt with, includes, inter alia, the sector of environmental, food, social security and accident prevention offences. In the light of the most recent regulatory developments, to which corresponds a progressive multiplication of the various incrimination techniques, the sector of ‘white collar’ crime now presents a level of specificity that requires the scholar to be able to fully master the institutes that constitute what, at present, can undoubtedly be defined as the ‘general part’ of corporate criminal law, with particular reference to the constitutional principles that constitute its foundation, to the subject of liable subjects (individual or collective), to the principle of necessary offensiveness and to the objective and subjective criteria of imputation within complex organisations. The course is therefore divided into two parts: the first is specifically dedicated to the general part of the institutes; the second deals with the analytical treatment of the most significant offences, intrinsically connected to the company's way of being and its activity.

Students are required to be able to briefly outline the framework of the punitive requirements arising from financial globalisation and the increasingly fierce predatory aggression of organised economic crime.
They are also required to be able to identify the responsible parties within the company, with particular reference to the institution of the delegation of functions and its conditions of validity and effectiveness. Students will be required to be able to analyse the institutions that traditionally govern the objective and subjective imputation of criminal liability (legal obligation of impediment and positions of guarantee, which are also subject to continuous regulatory innovations, concurrence of persons in the offence, extinguishing causes of punishability), as well as the effects, on a practical level, of their ‘reaction’ to the anonymous, impersonal and collective dimension of modern business organisations. It will also be required to be able to enucleate those general notions necessary to guarantee a systematic vision of the individual figures of offence, also in their relations and mutual interference, as well as to ensure the consistency of the various interpretative options.