The legitimacy of Consob on the use of the presumptive criterion on the objection of abuse of privileged information on investments

With sentence no. 867 of 29/10/19, the Court of Appeal of Cagliari acknowledged the legitimacy of the presumptive reasoning in ascertaining the offence as regards the abuse of privileged information on investments, emphasising the need for the circumstantial evidence provided in support of the dispute to allow for an unambiguous reconstruction of what took place, having to identify the unknown fact through indirect known facts taking place through a rigorous reconstruction that allows a univocal reading of the elements acquired, with the exclusion of the likelihood of other similar alternative connections. With respect to this, they neither constitute univocal elements such as to give rise to the presumption of knowledge of privileged information, nor does the fact that the sanctioned subject is a usual stock market investor, given that nothing can exclude that the investor had invested in the shares on the stock exchange because of his/her experience, nor the fact that he/she had close family ties with another person that was reasonably in possession of privileged information, nor that frequent telephone contact between the former that can be explained with the same relationship. The limited investment in proportion to availability or the possibility of obtaining additional financial resources is certainly not in the favour of the knowledge of privileged information.