Effective Dealing with Debt Collection

Where an immediately enforceable title does not exist, the main instrument for recovery of the debts arising out of commercial contracts remains the request for a judicial order for payment ("decreto ingiuntivo").

Even when a written contract is not available, the extension by the precedents of the role of the supporting evidence of accounting records even outside those cases of "supply of goods or of cash" under art. 634 of the Code of Civil Procedure (now confirmed by recent legislation), has rendered it possible to proceed in this way in the greater part of cases in which the debtor is resident in Italy.

A problem however encountered in practice is the ease with which the debtor manages to delay payment for the entire time of an ordinary legal proceedings each time the amount of the order obtained is even just a little higher than the effective amount due. In said case once an opposition is proposed in a timely way it is impossible for the Court to grant provisional