News Supreme Court rulings February 2021

1. Sports agents’ compensation: clarification from the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court, in its recent order no. 853/2021 intervened on the issue of sports agents’ compensation, shedding light on a number of provisions of the 2011 FIGC Players’ Agents Regulations taken from the December 4, 2020 FIGC Sports Agents Regulations and therefore still relevant.

Specifically, the Ermellini affirmed that in the case of a new player’s sports performance contract, which overlaps even for a few years with a previous sports performance contract, “the player is obliged to pay in full the commission due to the agent for the previous contract and, if this is determined as an annual percentage, until its natural expiration”; while to the agent who negotiated the new contract, the commission is due only on the difference between the annual gross income under the first contract and that under the new contract.

2. Faking the need to replace the boiler is contract fraud.

The Supreme Court, in upholding the conviction for fraud of a technician in charge of the maintenance of a boiler who, after leading the customer to believe that the boiler needed to be replaced despite the fact that it was working properly, went unavailable after collecting the down payment, clarified that in the so-called “boiler maintenance” case, the technician had to be replaced. “contractual” fraud, “the element that imparts a criminally relevant connotation to the conduct of default is constituted by the initial intent, which, by influencing the negotiating will of one of the two contracting parties–determining him to enter into the contract by virtue of artifice and deception and, therefore, distorting his volitional process–reveals in the contract its intimate nature of deceptive purpose.”

On the other hand – the Court specified – for the purposes of the existence of the crime of fraud, the lack of diligence on the part of the offended person is not relevant, “since this circumstance does not exclude the suitability of the means, resolving itself in a mere deficiency of attention often determined by the trust obtained by artifice and deception.” in the present case, the customer/consumer, lacking specific knowledge about the operation of a boiler, placed his trust in the expert, who deceitfully induced him to incur an unnecessary expense (Cass. pen, sec. II, no. 4039, Feb. 2, 2021).

3. Right to image and limits to the right to report.

On the subject of image rights, the Supreme Court, in its most recent order no. 4477 of Feb. 19, 2021, ruled that the public interest in the dissemination of a news story, in the presence of the conditions legitimizing the exercise of the right to report the news, must be kept distinct from that, different and not overlapping with the first, concerning the legitimacy of the publication or dissemination also of the images of the people involved, the lawfulness of which postulates the existence of a specific and autonomous public interest in the knowledge of the features of the protagonists, or the consent of the persons portrayed or the other exceptional conditions provided by the legal system.

In the case at hand, the First Chamber of the Supreme Court set aside on remand the appellate ruling that had rejected a claim for damages suffered by a minor girl in a vegetative state who, on the occasion of an article published in certain newspapers, had appeared portrayed together with a well-known soccer player who had gone to the hospital to visit her.