Resumen de Social Enterprises and Benefit Corporations in Italy
Italy has been the first country in the world to adopt the US benefit corporation model (so-called società benefit (SB)), which it transplanted into its legal system at the end of 2015. The Italian società benefit statute is a mix between the US Model Benefit Corporation Legislation and the Delaware Public Benefit Corporation Act but is characterized by some peculiar features, such as the scope of the legislation, which is applicable to all for-profit and cooperative organizational forms provided by the law, and the existence of a public enforcement mechanism based on the attribution of supervisory powers to the Italian Competition Authority. A few years after its introduction, società benefit seems to have been widely accepted, and the movement continues to grow. Furthermore, the Italian legal system continues to support the spread of the SB model, e.g., through the 2019 amendment of the “Public Contract Code,” which introduced new reward criteria for tendering companies that publish the annual report required by the società benefit law to assess their social and environmental impacts. From a comparative law perspective, the Italian “for-benefit” model has been the first one adopted by a civil law system and seems to have influenced other civil law countries.
