FIGC, legal opinions: Malagò election invalid due to lack of membership

Membership was an essential requirement for the election as head of the FIGC and Giovanni Malagò did not have it. This is the meaning of the four opinions of the lawyers Franco Gaetano Scoca, Luigi Medugno, Massimo Coccia and Alberto Angeletti, documents which ANSA has seen.

However, in the pages received by CONI there is no mention of commissionership as a direct and inevitable consequence: in Medugno's text it is written about "dutiful assessments" submitted to the competent bodies of CONI but "characterized by margins of deliberative discretion as regards the weighting of the seriousness of the infringements found".

In order for the Board to decide in this sense, as per article 7 of the CONI Statute, "serious violations in the sporting system" are needed, i.e. conduct that violates fundamental rules, principles or obligations of this system and which are such as to significantly compromise the autonomy, regularity or correct pursuit of the institutional purposes of the body. The question will revolve around this gravity.

According to Medugno, these will be choices of a "strictly technical-legal (and never political) nature" whose objective will be to evaluate whether "omissions, negligence or incompetence" or "behavior such as to reach the threshold of a serious violation of the Statute and the Fundamental Principles superordinate to it" can be recognized in the matter. Even for the lawyer Scoca "it is up to the competent bodies of the Coni to evaluate the consequences", although there is no doubt about the merits of the question: "The election of the non-member is invalid".

All four opinions agree in siding with the General Prosecutor's Office for sport: in article 29 paragraph 1 of the Football Federation Statute, the formula "if in compliance with the membership on the date of submission of the application" presupposes a current membership as a fundamental requirement, whereas the FIGC Prosecutor's Office read "being in compliance with the membership" as something different from "being a member".

For Coccia, therefore, it is a "subjective requirement of candidacy and consequent eligibility", for Angeletti "there can be no doubt".

Angeletti himself, however, refers to the failure to challenge the candidacy within the terms established by the Statute (Art. 21 paragraph 4, "the Federal Guarantee Commission immediately ascertains, and in any case no later than 7 days after the election, any hypothesis of incompatibility"): "I have no information - he writes - regarding whether or not the challenge took place, within the aforementioned terms". Medugno dedicates a more incisive passage to the matter, regarding the appeals presented by the lawyer Renato Miele in recent months, which "although inadmissible contained timely reporting of a radical flaw. The Federal Prosecutor's Office failed to take any appeal initiative - he continues -. The Federation left the interested party's repeated requests for access unanswered and did not appear in the ex-federal proceedings".

A "genetic flaw" of an election for which, however, the "only initiative that can be undertaken by CONI to restore violated legality falls within the scope of provisional activities". The word "commissionership" appears in hypothetical form only here, a few lines below, where we read that "it will be up to the National Council to formulate any commissionership proposal, and to the National Council to decide whether to decide in accordance with it". In short, the violation is clear, but the decision will have to evaluate its actual weight.