L'INDEMNITY CLAUSE NEI CONTRATTI DI CESSIONE DI PARTECIPAZIONI SOCIALI

“Indemnity clauses in sale and purchase agreement under Italian law” This work is a comparative analysis of the problems arising from indemnity clauses in sale and purchase agreements under Italian Law. In a contract for the sale of shares of a s.p.a or a s.r.l., the seller usually provides representations and warranties by which he guarantees to the buyer the presence of certain characteristics of the target company’s assets. The collateral asset, financial and income provided for this purpose is usually integrated and completed by indemnity clauses, through which the parties regulate the activation and the limits of the guarantees, as well as the consequences and remedies arising from their breach of these representations and warranties. In particular, the content of indemnity clauses may consist of an obligation to: a) indemnify and hold the buyer harmless from any current or potential contingent liability (usually existing at the last balance sheet date); b ) indemnify the buyer for any undeclared debt or loss of assets; c) compensate for any loss or damage suffered by the target that would not have occurred if the financial situation of the company were correctly represented and described in the business warranties contained in the sale and purchase agreement. The thesis contains three sections: (i) a description of the main theoretical problems arising from the application of indemnity clauses, typical of the common law systems, to the Italian legal system; (ii) an exam of the different ways in which an indemnity clause could be drafted by the parties in the most common cases, as well as the interpretative issues involved; (iii) a study of the strong difficulty to frame the indemnity clause under the categories of the Italian legal system (such as, for example, damages, price adjustment, penalty clauses) with an attempt to understand how to recognize the indemnity clause its own juridical autonomy. Granting such autonomy and, as the author tried to do, identifying a set of rules which could be used to regulate the indemnity clause appears to be necessary. This is not only in the light of the difficult application of Italian law to the issues created by the breach of business warranties in sale and purchase agreements, but also in the light of the cross-border and transnational scenario in which the indemnity clause is usually used and operates.