One thing has now become unbearable, and that is that on every law there must be a comment from Dr Sabelli, president of the National Magistrates Association. L'ANM it is a union-type association and no one has ever given it the task of reviewing every decision of the Government and Parliament, not even those concerning criminal or civil crimes. And Sabelli, due to professional deformation, always and only relies on repression, asking to entrust the Judiciary with the task of investigating across the board, to make Italians virtuous by making them hear the tinkling of the handcuffs.
Instead, in many cases the problems are not to be fought only with repression, but it is necessary to act with prevention, that is, with changes to the organizational and political structures capable of changing people's behaviour. There corruption it is one of them. As Assonime has well illustrated in one of its recent documents, this phenomenon derives primarily from the intrusion of politics into the management of public affairs used in an unscrupulous manner to feed clientele or vote-exchange (and, incidentally, the preferences are a system that risks increasing patronage pressure). Then there is the need to simplify and clarify the entire legislation, while it would be necessary to reorganize the PA on a merit basis and transparent standards in the evaluation of the results. In short, corruption is the last link in a long chain of deviant behaviors that arise from bad politics and that have now nestled in a particular way in the local authorities which have increased their power and economic resources in recent years. Hence also the fragmentation of the parties which now appear more and more like a coalition of local Ras.
With the reform approved in the Senate on Wednesday, public attention has focused on the reinstatement of the crime of "false accounting" considered an indicator of other possible deviant behavior. That is, it is believed that false accounting serves to establish black funds from which to draw to bribe politicians or public officials. In reality, false accounting could serve a thousand other purposes: from the entrepreneur's personal interest in paying less taxes, to an attempt to reassure the market (lenders and customers) about the state of health of the company.
But apart from this forcaiola simplification, it is necessary to understand well what it is about when we talk about yes fake balance sheets. As is well known, all financial statements contain the entrepreneur's subjective assessments of the value of certain items (for example credits), so that a real forgery occurs only when certain behaviors are malicious, that is, they are carried out with fraudulent intent. Easy to say, but less easy to construct a rule that exactly identifies the case of fraud so as not to create a total legal uncertainty in companies which would expose all top management to the risk of being investigated, and perhaps imprisoned, for choices which then in the trial turn out to be completely legitimate.
Furthermore, we should avoid giving magistrates excessive discretion, because, given the lackluster performance of our judges, this would cause further uncertainty in entrepreneurs and would constitute a further element of the brake on investments, including those from abroad, which everyone instead invokes.
Mind you the crime of false accounting is foreseen in all western countries. And it is natural to prosecute those who fraudulently falsify the numbers to deceive the markets. But this is not only related to corruption, but should be seen more correctly as an important chapter of transparency, which is an essential requirement for the functioning of a system based on the free market. On the other hand, an oppressive police system based only on repression and harsher penalties is largely ineffective as well as being dangerous for citizens' freedom. After all, more than twenty years after Mani Pulite, the great repressive wave that hit politicians and entrepreneurs, it doesn't seem that the system has improved much, so much so that we are still here discussing the same things as then.
