The instalments
The heart of the European law was due to become enforceable. Six days earlier came the regulation that postpones it to December 2027 and, in the meantime, lightens it. What stays on, what was taken away without anyone talking about it. The critiques come later: this part looks at the cards on the table, and does not judge.
The season’s legislative building sites, read as a single design: the same hand, the same method, the same beneficiary.
Two prosecutors twice convicted, acquitted by the Court of Cassation: the act did not occur. In the Italian press the word «innocent» never appears. The newspapers’ words, before and after, verifiable line by line.
The Sisto Commission’s project: the 231 model presumed adequate exempts the company and shields the employer, save for gross negligence. Our reading, line by line, numbers in hand.
Italy’s corporate liability law turns twenty-five: a year of celebrations, conferences and certificates of attendance, organised by the market that lives off it. And the birthday brought a gift: the reform, now a government bill.
A ministerial reform that rewrites the failed law, an artificial intelligence that produces for free what used to be sold for its weight in gold, judges who are beginning to lose patience. And an industry that is meanwhile already laying the table for the next party.
The doses in the workers’ blood, the effects already written down in the studies, the successors to PFOA that were not safe. And the guinea pigs who stopped being guinea pigs.
Nobody knows how many Decree 231 consultants there are, how much they bill, or whether their models serve any purpose. What is known is how much judicial application the law produces: very little. A journey inside a market that lives off the uncertainty it promises to eliminate.
The law explained to those outside the trade: where Decree 231 comes from, how the pact between State and business works, what it had promised and what the case law has made of it in twenty-five years.
In twenty-five years the law on corporate liability for criminal offences has generated the richest business in Italian criminal law, and almost no verifiable results. Paper compliance, gold for the consultants. We present the new series in four parts.
I have called the men and women of this story “guinea pigs”. It is not a rhetorical flourish: it is, I fear, the exact definition. A guinea pig has not chosen, does not know, and someone else decides about its body. Here begins the count of the damage to health: the reckoning that no one has finished making.
On Thursday 16 July, in Genoa, the Court of Assize reads its judgment on the collapse of the Morandi bridge: 43 dead. An essay by Luca Santa Maria, dedicated to Federico Stella, on the style with which the defences of the powerful are built.
Italy is a land of industrial disasters, and yet corporate crimes remain “anonymous”: little studied, little perceived, little prosecuted. Claudia Marcolungo, lecturer in Environmental Law at the University of Padua, picks up the thread of the counter-manifesto and tackles a theme that has remained below the surface: corporate anonymity.
A counter-manifesto on the Moretti case. On 2 July 2026, in la Repubblica and Il Sole 24 Ore, a paid page appeared in defence of a citizen who is never named, and whom everyone recognises. We reply.
Spinetta and Trissino are not two stories: they are the two mouths of a single volcano. One and the same molecule — cC6O4, which belongs to Solvay — and one and the same directing hand weld them into a single disaster, extending across almost the whole of the North. A disaster that remains invisible, because no one — starting with the Ministry of the Environment — will agree to call it by its name.
Inside the Miteni judgment — the findings of fact against Syensqo and DuPont are right there.
In Taranto the “State that lets it happen” has a more naked face than elsewhere: it does not merely fail to see, it legislates so as not to stop. A recent essay reads the Ilva case with the tools of the criminology of the crimes of the powerful — and shows how the law became the site of the symbiosis between State and business, and harm to health a thing that was, for years, perfectly legal.
In the United States corporate crime has a science that studies it as an empiricist would: it observes its organisation, measures its harm in the field, and derives from it templates that help the judge to read the facts. We follow it along two threads — environmental crimes and international corruption — to their common knot, the State that lets it happen, and up to the present day: because both subjects follow the political wind, and today that wind is blowing backwards.
The story of an investigation that never truly began. Premise and guide to reading.
The opening of an investigation in parts into the largest environmental poisoning ever established in Italy.