Control over organizational models in the Italian legal system

The Italian law (L.D. No. 231/2001) provides that the implementation of an organizational and managerial model, before the commission of an offence, may constitute a cause of exemption from ‘ex crimine’ corporate liability. To this end, the organizational and managerial model must be ‘adequate’ to prevent the commission of offences of the same kind as the one committed. To ensure the effective application of the preventive model, the Italian legislator introduced the ‘supervisory body’, which is in charge of supervising the functioning as well as the implementation of, and compliance with, the same organizational and managerial model. My research aims at analyzing the links between the preventive model and its supervisor, i.e. the supervisory body, within the complex system of attribution of ‘ex crimine’ liability to legal entities. For this purpose, functions, features and the structure of the supervisory body will be analyzed in order to establish the extent to which a ‘lack of or insufficient supervision’ by the supervisor constitutes an ‘organizational failure’ that, as such, may be attributed to the same legal entity