As mentioned in our eAlert of 1 October 2015, on 15 August 2015 Law No. 114/2015 (the Delegation Law) entered into force providing for a delegation of powers to the Italian Government to implement Directive 2014/59/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 May 2014 establishing a framework for the recovery and resolution of credit institutions and investment firms (the BRRD) in Italy. The delegation of powers expires after a period of 3 months, meaning that the actual implementation of the BRRD should in theory occur by the deadline of 15 November 2015.
On 15 September 2015, the Council of Ministers approved two draft legislative decrees of implementation (the Draft Decrees): (i) a text which is a stand alone law, and (ii) a text which provides for amendments to Legislative Decree No. 385 of 1 September 1993 (the Italian Banking Act) [For more details, please see the above-mentioned eAlert].
Currently, the Draft Decrees are under the scrutiny of a few Commissions at the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, each of which will release an opinion. The Council of Ministers will have to examine again the Draft Decrees in light of these opinions before issuing the final text of the decrees of implementation (the Final Decrees).
As the deadline for certain of the selected parliamentary Commissions to provide comments expires on 15 November 2015, the Government has been granted a three months “bonus” pursuant to Article 31 of Law No. 234/2012, as referred to in the Delegation Law. This means that the deadline to approve the Decrees is 15 February 2016, rather than 15 November 2015.
In other words, upon the release of the opinion by the Commissions at the latest on 15 November 2015, the Council of Minister can be summoned anytime prior to 15 February 2015 to issue the Decrees, which will have to be published in the Italian Official Journal (Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana) to enter into force.
We note that the published reports prepared by two of the parliamentary Commissions reviewing the text of the Draft Decrees have taken on board the suggested amendment noted in our previous eAlert (mentioned above) in order to ensure that any limitation of the statutory right of set-off permitted by Article 56 of the Bankruptcy Law will apply solely in the absence of a financial collateral, netting or set-off agreement.
TEXT
The text of the Draft Decrees are in Italian only.
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