Giuffré, 2007.
The reform of the crime of fraudulent corporate bankruptcy (Art. 4 Legislative Decree April 11, 2002 No. 61) represents a fundamental milestone in the field of bankruptcy crimes. The presence of a causal link between the corporate crimes referred to in “Art. 223 II paragraph no. 1 of the Bankruptcy Law and the insolvency, long advocated by legal doctrine and then accepted with Legislative Decree No. 61/2002, probably constitutes an anticipation of what should be the reform of bankruptcy crimes, in which the crime of fraudulent bankruptcy should be linked to the” insolvency of the bankrupt company or at least to a causal relationship between the bankruptcy and the fraudulent conduct. This gives rise to a series of interference problems between the offenses of fraudulent patrimonial bankruptcy and corporate bankruptcy, which are analyzed in the first part of the work.

The second part of the work is dedicated to bankruptcy caused by willful misconduct or as a result of fraudulent operations. We thus witness a progressive rotation of the norm from an almost exceptional case, as a closing norm, to an ordinary formula of contestation for most corporate bankruptcies. However, its progressive and ever-increasing practical application does not coincide with a clear and felicitous formulation: many define this crime – in which acts straddling “civil and criminal wrongdoing rise to criminally relevant conduct – as an ‘enigmatic figure’ of the” legal system.