The Court of Appeal of Florence canceled the sanctions imposed last year by Consob on former mayors and directors of Banca Etruria for the alleged lack of information contained in the prospectus of the capital increase carried out in 2013 to strengthen the equity of the Arezzo bank. Contrary to what was claimed by the supervisory authority, when the latter authorized the publication of the prospectus on the capital increase, it was fully aware of the state of difficulty facing the bank. And, undoubtedly, the information framework became completely complete at the beginning of 2014 - it is written in the sentence of the Florentine court of appeal presided over by judge Edoardo Monti and of which the magistrate Domenico Paparo was rapporteur - when the commission acquired the documents of the inspections carried out in the previous months by the Bank of Italy. Only after a long time, in 2016, when the 180 days envisaged by the law for initiating a sanctioning process had well elapsed, did Consob - at the time chaired by Giuseppe Vegas - decide to act by initiating a proceeding which ended with the sanctioning resolution .
The sanctioning procedure, which was also much discussed at the end of 2017 within the parliamentary commission on banking crises, was initiated by the supervisory commission which claimed to have been informed only in 2016 of three documents from the Bank of Italy. However, two of these, the most important ones - was the defense thesis put forward by the lawyer Renzo Ristuccia and substantially endorsed by the magistrates - were perfectly aware of the authority since the end of 2013. As for the third, relating to a note from the Bank of Italy of 24 July 2012, was the expression of an "interlocutory confrontation" between the same banking supervision and the Arezzo institute subsequently superseded by events. Of "much different depth and importance" were the other two documents, of which Consob received news directly from via Nazionale which, in accordance with the memorandum of understanding between the two authorities, gave an account of the "mainly unfavorable" outcome of the inspection conducted in the previous months.
In essence - the magistrates observed - "having Consob learned from the Bank of Italy on 6.12.2013 that Banca Etruria was on the verge of receivership unless it merged with a larger bank of the two: either it was believed (or at least it was suspected) that the prospectus published a few months earlier had not given an account of this and therefore would have been false and misleading (as in fact Consob came to contest it in October 2016) but then Consob had to start immediately the investigation; or it was ascertained that the prospectus had correctly represented the economic situation of the issuing bank to the public of investors, but then no sanction could be imposed”.
