My keenness on human and social sciences, I believe, lies at the roots of my career. “ 21 www.lawyer-monthly.com Lawyer Monthly Legal Awards 2024 Guido, can you tell us about your journey into law and what led you to specialize in white-collar crime, amongst other areas of law? It is a long story. To an extent, it is a family thing: my father was a lawyer too, but he specialized in a different branch of the law. My keenness on human and social sciences, I believe, lies at the roots of my career; it was the same passion that brought me to France, where I studied for some time before landing, so to speak, at the Faculty of Law of the Catholic University, in Milan. After all, criminal law is where human rights and the enforcement of the law intersect, whether we are talking about the rights of the victim or the rights of the defendant. Indeed, I would say that if one wants to measure the degree of civilization of a country, one should look into the daily functioning of courtrooms and, there, look at the substantive and procedural guarantees offered by the law as a crucial indicator. In the course of my career, many factors drove me towards specializing in white-collar crime. Without doubt, having taken my first steps with an undisputed authority in the field, Professor Alberto Crespi, played a role in that. My innate curiosity must have had a bearing too: indeed, defending a person in a criminal trial is a multidisciplinary enterprise and success is ensured only by enriching one’s legal background with knowledge of the most disparate subjects, from engineering to medicine, from finance to other branches of the domestic and international law. Studio Legale Alleva & Associati has handled many highprofile cases. Can you share a particularly challenging case and how your team managed to achieve a successful outcome? I can hardly pick one. During my over 35-year-long career, I had the honor to be on many of the main business-related criminal cases that occurred in Italy, such as the Sindona’s affair, the crack of the Banco Ambrosiano, the inquiries of “Mani Pulite”, the disaster of Porto Marghera, the Cirio and Parmalat cases, the BNL-UNIPOL trial, the Italease case, the trial of IFIL-EXOR, the MPS case, the trials of ENI Algeria and ENI Nigeria, the Thyssenkrupp case, the ETERNIT case and many others. Complexity has always been common to all our engagements: we collect multiple items of information by looking into the Prosecutor’s file and by talking to our clients and expert witnesses; equally, in every case there are always multiple issues that fall for consideration, in point of law and fact, and, when studying them, we must consistently attain the highest degree of depth. We leave nothing to chance. To achieve this, team working is key and, in this respect, I must say that serving as an officer in the Italian mountain troops had a significant impact on my personal development and education: a team can properly work only as long as every role is clearly set out and every team-member is fully aware that one’s work affects everyone else’s and, thereby, the final outcome. Setting a defensive line is, likewise, a collective enterprise that requires all team members’ contributions to be put together in a meaningful way as a result of a constant exchange of views. Some years ago, we dealt with a case which would then become a leading case as to “preventive measures” applied to businesses. Being without any precedents in the previous applications of the same rules, the experience was of the highest interest. Eventually, we were able to come up with new solutions that enabled us effectively to deal with the organizational shortcomings pointed out by the Prosecutor and the Court – thereby achieving the withdrawal of the preventive measure enforced against the company we were representing – and, at the same time, allowed us to ensure our client’s going concern throughout all the proceeding. What are the most common types of white-collar crimes you encounter, and how have the types of offenses being committed evolved over the years? In my career, I have found myself defending people against the most diverse kinds of allegations. In Italy, in the early 90s, it was almost all about bribery; then, scientific development and new epidemiological patterns resulted in mounting attention towards environmental offences, defective-product liability and health and safety at work. Moreover, the large bank conglomerates that formed in Italy at the beginning of the millennium, together with the trend of the financial markets and the 2007-2008 crisis, had ramifications in cases that hit the crime-news sections, involving Q Q Q
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