Cirio, under extraordinary administration and led by Extraordinary Commissioners Professors Luigi Farenga, Lucio Francario and Attilio Zimatore, represented by Professor Antonio Briguglio, obtained an important ruling before the First Civil Division of the Italian Supreme Court (Order No. 4233 of 25 February 2026), which quashed the appellate judgment rendered by the remand court on the grounds that it departed from the principle of law previously established by the Supreme Court in its earlier decision between the same parties (Order No. 3299/2017).
The Supreme Court reaffirmed that press reports concerning a company’s financial difficulties may constitute presumptive evidence of scientia decoctionis. The Court observed that, although there is no legal obligation to obtain information through newspapers, it is a matter of common knowledge that economic operators keep themselves informed about market developments and financial conditions of businesses with which they maintain commercial relationships.
Accordingly, the publication of news concerning a company’s state of financial distress in newspapers recognised at a national level constitutes a “known fact” from which it is possible to infer, together with other evidentiary elements, the “unknown fact”, namely the creditor’s knowledge of that state of insolvency.
The Court further held that press reports are a fully valid evidentiary element for establishing scientia decoctionis. Their relevance cannot be excluded in general or in theory; rather, they must be assessed on a case-by-case basis, in accordance with the logic of presumptive reasoning embodied in the principle of id quod plerumque accidit and in conjunction with the other available evidence.
The Supreme Court also clarified that the fact that a document (in this case, the press reviews mentioned in the list of exhibits) could not be found in the case file did not authorise the court to refrain from examining it, treating it as non-existent. Where there is no record of a party having collected their file, the court may not dismiss the application on the grounds of lack of evidence, but must order the appropriate searches to be carried out by the registry and, if necessary, grant the party a time limit to recreate its file.