“The Paper Gold of Decree 231”
Legislative Decree 231 of 2001, the statute on the criminal liability of companies, and the market that has grown up around it: the richest business in Italian criminal law, and almost no verifiable result. Paper compliance, gold for the consultants. A series in four parts.
The parts
Why this series, from what position we write it, and what the parts will recount. “No one, in this story, will be let off lightly. Not even the profession to which we belong.”
The law explained to those outside the trade: where it comes from, how the pact between State and business works, what it had promised and what the case law has made of it.
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.
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.
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.
“The Baubles on the Tree”: the part that closes the series.