Timeliness of notification upon full knowledge of the fact

The Court of Cassation, with judgment No. 50 dated 3 January 2017, intervened in the matter of dismissal for cause, clarifying that the timeliness of a disciplinary notice must be assessed with reference to the time when full knowledge of the fact is acquired, stating instead that for that purpose a mere suspicion is not sufficient. In the case in question, the Court dismissed the appeal of a Trenitalia employee who was dismissed for having unlawfully made use of 238 tickets already used to resell them or for illegal reimbursement. Among the reasons of appeal stated by the employee, there was the lack of timeliness of the notification, since it occurred 60 days after the end of the works performed by the first investigative committee appointed by the company and, in any case, after 11 months from the occurrence of the alleged facts. Among the reasons of the judgment, the Court deemed that the time allocated for the preliminary inspections before the start of the proceedings was consequent to the necessary complex investigations undertaken by the company, which required two investigative committees. In particular, the notification to the employee was served twenty days after the decision of the Second Committee, that is, in a reasonable time and in any case in accordance with the period of 30 days required by the applied National Collective Bargaining Agreement. The Court of Cassation, in the same judgement, recalling its previous case law, also noted that “even if Article 7 of law No. 300/1970 does not mandatorily call for the employer to voluntarily make available to the worker the documentation on which a disciplinary case is based, nevertheless the employer should offer it for browsing according to the principles of fairness and good faith in the implementation of the contract whenever the accused would requests it and the review of such documents is necessary for an appropriate defence”. Such request, in this case, was not made. In addition, the Court stated that the appeal did not mention any document which could demonstrate that such timely request to review the disciplinary proceedings documentation had been issued.