La tutela penale delle funzioni di vigilanza. Il «nuovo» avamposto del microcredito

Art. 132 of the Consolidation act of banking law (TULB d. lgs. 385/1993) punishes the exercise of “microcredit” without being registered into the dedicated list of the operators of this specific sector of financial intermediation with the same sanction established for the abusive exercise of financing The new offence belongs to the category of the offences based on the absence of authorisation; its structure has many elements in common with that of other abuses envisaged by the same TULB (e.g., abusive collecting of savings; abusive banking; abusive emission of electronic currency etc.). The most relevant difference concerns the object of protection. Indeed, the new crime of abusive exercise of microcredit is characterised by the fact that the functions of the Banca d’Italia will be protected in the phase of first implementation, and those of another body in a second moment. Thus, the penal regulation of microcredit contributes to the advancement of the frontier of the penal protection of monitoring functions, by detaching it from the functions of the Banca d’Italia. Such a “new” outpost of criminal law requires a double check: on the one hand, establishing whether the abusive exercise of microcredit justifies the resort to a criminal sanction; on the other hand, establishing whether the functions of this new organism deserve the same protection afforded to the monitoring functions of the Banca d’Italia.