Abstract

This article provides an interest-group analysis of the recent Italian corporate law reform. It shows, first, that the reform has been the outcome of two driving forces: the activism of legislative bureaucracies at various Ministries and the current parliamentary majority's willingness to have its leader acquitted from false accounting charges by reshaping the relevant criminal provisions (in fact, in order to make it more politically acceptable, this was done within a more general reform framework). It then shows that the reform has increased the rents of accountants, providers of services related to the companies register, public notaries, corporate lawyers and corporate law professors. Finally, it argues that the correspondingly higher costs for Italian firms are not offset by the purportedly greater flexibility of the new corporate law framework nor by the efficiency gains possibly stemming from new mandatory rules.