The Constitutional Court rejects the appeal of the Lombardy Region, declaring the questions raised on the decree law containing the rules for the transformation of popular banks into joint stock companies inadmissible in part and in part unfounded.
In the appeal presented to the Consulta, the Region led by the Northern League Roberto Maroni argued that the State, by legislating on the popular ones, had harmed the competences due to the Regions. A thesis that, however, the constitutional judges did not accept.
In detail, the Constitutional Court established that "the choice of the state legislator to assume the asset threshold of 8 billion euro as an index of the size of the popular bank" to be transformed into a joint-stock company "is consistent with the purpose" of the law. And from this point of view "the state legislator has kept within the limits of its powers".
As regards the question relating to the instrument used by the Government to legislate, in the documents accompanying the decree law with the measures on the Popolari, the Executive justified the reasons of necessity and urgency for the adoption of the decree law by referring to the adaptation of the "banking system to European guidelines" and to "strong requests from the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Development and Economic Cooperation to transform the major cooperative banks into joint-stock companies", reads the ruling on the Popolari. Reasons that "exclude that there is an evident lack of the requirement of the extraordinary necessity and urgency to provide".
This ruling by the Consulta anticipates the verdict that the Court itself will have to express on the partial rejection of the reform by the Council of State. Meanwhile, the government plans to include in the forthcoming decree on banks also measures for the extension of the transformation into joint stock companies for the cooperative banks (Bari and Sondrio) which have not yet approved in this sense.
