Cooperative Compliance Measures to Prevent Organised Crime Infiltrations and the Protection of the EU's Financial Interests. A New Gold Standard in the Implementation of the Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan?

Strengthening the enforcement instruments to combat organised crime means ensuring a more effective protection of the EU’s financial interests, which are affected by the illegal activities of these criminal groups. In Italy, there is a growing awareness that the fight against such trafficking cannot be entrusted only to traditional criminal law enforcement tools. Rather, with the perspective of an integrated approach, criminal justice system should be supported by purely preventive measures, including at the administrative level. The Italian legislator has therefore bet on the implementation of cooperative compliance (preventive) tools to combat organised crime, including the judicial control of companies and the recent measure of “collaborative prevention”, introduced in 2021 precisely in the context of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Decree Law No. 152/2021). The main goal of this Plan is to make good use of every resource of the NGEU in a timeeffective manner, ensuring that all necessary checks are performed quickly but without jeopardising the quality of preventative monitoring. These provisions are examples of the tension between quality and sustainability of public controls. Indeed, the reform aims at a public-private partnership whereby, for instance, the company is not directly confiscated or excluded from the public sphere, but simply subjected to forms of public monitoring and called upon to introduce organisational measures in order to combat the infiltrations in place and prevent new ones. The objective of this paper is, therefore, to analyse these new measures and to verify – also in a European de iure condendo approach – whether they are able to ensure efficiency of administrative public controls and fair procedural guarantees to protect the fundamental rights of companies from a punitive/criminal law perspective.