From Italia Oggi, 6/7/2019, an interesting conclusion from the Supreme Court on the issue of money laundering committed abroad:

“In the case of the commission abroad of the predicate offense to money laundering, the criminal relevance of the fact must be ascertained by both the foreign and Italian courts according to their respective systems. This was decided by the Criminal Section of the Supreme Court in ruling No. 23190/2019. The dispute arose as a result of an appeal by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the decision of the review court to annul the seizure decree for the crime of money laundering under Article 648-bis of the Criminal Code, relating to sums of money made to flow back from Spanish companies traceable to the defendant and invested in an Italian company. The charge had also arisen in Spain, but the administrative and criminal trial on the alleged illegality of the transaction had ended with the acquittal of the entrepreneur and the subsequent declaration of its regularity. According to the prosecutor, since the conduct presupposed to be money laundering committed on foreign soil, it is the Italian judge’s burden to independently proceed to a new assessment of the fact, already judged by the foreign judicial authority, reaching a kind of factual revision of the foreign judge’s final decisions. The panel of legitimacy did not find this thesis supportable because, not only, the fact deemed to be a prerequisite for the crime of money laundering must be of a criminal nature in the foreign country, but the Italian court must verify the concurrent criminal relevance of the same fact also under Italian law. In this case, “the national judge may well assume the fact (considered illegal in both legal systems) as a prerequisite of the crime referred to in Art. 648 bis of the Italian Penal Code (…) having, on the other hand, to take into consideration the acquittal verdicts pronounced in the foreign country.” The judges of legitimacy also confirmed the correctness of the decision of the review in a further aspect, because the defendant could not be charged with the crime of money laundering since he was “co-participant in the predicate crime and given the reservation clause in the first paragraph of Article 648 bis of the Criminal Code. At most, liability for the crime of self-laundering under Article 648-ter.1 of the Criminal Code would have been conceivable, but limited to acts committed after the entry into force of Law 186 of December 15, 2014.”