The Calabria Regional Administrative Court, branch of Reggio, accepted the appeal of a company assisted by the lawyer Vincenzo Melara (Palmi court), annulling the denial of the license necessary for collecting bets. The ruling notes that the Police Headquarters did not adequately explain why the owner should be considered unreliable despite the company’s admission to judicial control and the presence of an administrator appointed by the Court. The matter concerns an activity already carried out with regular authorization, which was then revoked following an anti-mafia interdiction. After being admitted to judicial control, the owner had requested a new license to resume collecting bets. The Police Headquarters had rejected the application, recalling previous visits and maintaining the autonomy of its assessments with respect to the measure ordered by the prevention judge.
Judicial control is an institution of the anti-mafia code which allows, in the cases provided for by law, a process of reorganization of the company under judicial supervision, suspending the effects of the interdiction. In the case examined, supervision includes checks on accounting, financial flows, suppliers and personnel: concrete guarantees which, according to the TAR, the administration must take into account.
Accepting the defense’s complaints, the panel clarified that the application concerned the restart of an already authorized activity and found a “serious motivational deficit” in the refusal. Even recognizing an autonomous power of evaluation to the Police Headquarters, it was necessary to indicate specific circumstances not considered by the prevention judge, capable of justifying the judgment of unreliability during the judicial control.
The elements referred to by the administration had, however, largely already been examined by the Prevention Court. The further episode invoked was considered generic and lacking sufficient elements to support that assessment. For the TAR, the denial thus ended up hindering the very process of recovery that the judicial control aims to make possible.
«The protection of legality and the possibility for a company to continue a recovery process must be concretely implemented in administrative decisions», observes the lawyer Vincenzo Melara. «The sentence
requires that the current conditions of the company and the guarantees of judicial supervision be evaluated. It is on this relationship between prevention and continuity of economic activity that the defense has focused.”