A client comes to my firm asking to recover a debt owed by an SRL.

The client is holding a protested check, but the company based in the Province of Naples has not filed financial statements for the past two years, has no real estate, and there are no movable assets of appreciable value in the operating office.

Recovery therefore appears impossible, except that, from the viewings normally performed by the Firm in similar cases, it appears that the protested check does not appear in the Protest Register.

The circumstance is quite singular and points to an error in the chain of activities that, starting with the Bank where the check is placed for collection, leads, through the work of the Notary and the Chamber of Commerce officials, to the publication of the protest.

This is an error that could be entirely unintentional, or it could be a piece of the debtor's strategy to continue his business without suffering the deleterious effects of the publication of a protest.

I therefore decide to investigate further and, through extrajudicial activity, discover that an assistant to the Notary who had lifted the Protest had failed to send the appropriate notice to the competent Chamber of Commerce pursuant to Article 3 L. No. 77/1955. This would have resulted in the imposition of the disciplinary sanctions prescribed against the Notary.

At the conclusion of the affair, the notary was not reported to the appropriate bar, and within days of discovering the cause of the error, the debtor voluntarily paid the debt, including interest and expenses.