From complainant to accused: San Marino lawyer who spoke in Brussels sees her father indicted for slander

Francesca Maria Bacciocchi first wrote to EUalive in January. She is a lawyer admitted to the San Marino Bar. She was also, she said, living inside a case that had already lasted more than a decade.

The letter was not a request to take her side on a private dispute. It was a request to look at a disturbing pattern. Every civil and criminal file in the dispute, she wrote, turned on a document that no judge had ever examined on the merits. From that omission came seizures, attachments, civil judgments — and a criminal file opened not against the Banca di San Marino, but against the man who had reported what was happening in the bank: her father, Livio Bacciocchi.

Eight months later the pattern has tightened. Bacciocchi has now been notified that her father has been indicted for slander (“calunnia”). The charge was started by Investigating Judge Roberto Battaglino in the decree that dismissed Livio Bacciocchi’s complaint of 13 May 2025. That complaint asked the authorities to check whether a debt of €6.6 million claimed by companies of the Banca di San Marino group exists in the company’s own accounts. The former sole statutory auditor of the claiming company had testified that it did not. A sworn expert report reached the same conclusion.

Every attempt to have the framework agreement examined on its merits failed, and Bacciocchi turned from complainant into defendant, while the acknowledgement of debt continued to serve as the basis for seizures and foreclosures.

The letter, and the conference

In January Bacciocchi described the core of the case in plain terms. In 2011 the family and companies of the Banca di San Marino group signed a Framework Agreement. It was meant to close a web of leasing and financial relationships in one settlement: value the properties, calculate reciprocal credits and debts, set them off, and — if a dispute remained — go to arbitration rather than to court.

On the same day another paper was created: an acknowledgment of a debt of €6,596,200 in favour of BSM Immobiliare. The family says that paper was never negotiated, was not part of the agreed package, and cannot sit with an agreement that still required valuations and set-off before anyone could know who owed what. The bank used it anyway. From November 2013 it became the basis of summary proceedings, seizures and a chain of enforcement measures.

Every attempt to put the Framework Agreement before a court, Bacciocchi wrote, met the same contradiction. In civil cases the document was “inadmissible” because it had not been registered for tax — a cost the family says ran above a million euros, after assets had already been seized. In criminal cases it was “irrelevant” because the dispute was civil. The decisive contract stayed outside the file. The stand-alone title kept producing effects.

She listed what she said she could document: inequality of arms; a party too poor to register the central document being shut out of using it; inconsistent application of the same rules; decisions that always favoured the banking group; and the use of criminal procedure in a way that deters complaint.

She did not ask EUalive to endorse a thesis. She asked for attention to a file of dates, documents and judgments in a Council of Europe member state then moving closer to the European Union.

In early February she was invited to speak at a conference in Brussels organised by EUalive on San Marino’s judicial shortcomings, the Banca di San Marino controversy and the dispute with Bulgarian investor Assen Christov, whose attempt to buy a majority of the same bank collapsed with some €15 million frozen. The conference formed part of a wider argument, then led by Bulgaria, that San Marino’s EU Association Agreement should not advance while serious questions about justice and financial governance remained open.

Bulgaria leads push to put San Marino’s EU Association Agreement on hold

Bacciocchi told the room she supported closer ties with the EU. She also described hitting a “wall” in her own country’s courts. “I am very afraid,” she said.

San Marino’s government answered the conference, in which one of its diplomats was among the audience, with a statement about reputation and the financial system. Bacciocchi replied that reputation cannot be a substitute for a hearing on the merits.

What the 2025 complaint actually said

The May 2025 complaint was not a repetition of an old story with no new paper behind it — at least not in the form in which it was filed.

On 8 April 2025, in court, Avv. Chiara Taddei, sole statutory auditor of BSM Immobiliare from 2011 to 2018, testified that the company’s 2011 financial statements recorded total receivables of €1,613,567 and no receivable against Livio Bacciocchi.

A chartered accountant, Dr Maria Elena Bastoni, then examined the available accounts. In a sworn report dated 8 May 2025 she concluded that the alleged €6,596,200 receivable found no support in the documents forming part of those statements.

On 13 May 2025 Livio Bacciocchi sent that material to the criminal authorities. He asked them to obtain the underlying records and to check how the claimed receivable had moved between companies of the group.

On 12 June 2025 — less than a month later — Judge Battaglino dismissed the complaint. The decision treated it as a repeat of complaints from 2014 and 2020 and expressly stated that there was no new evidence and that the complaint amounted to a repetition of the same allegations. Reading the text of the dismissal decree, it is clear that neither the auditor’s testimony nor the sworn expert report was considered. It did not order the checks that had been requested. In the same act the judge opened a criminal file against Livio Bacciocchi for slander: knowingly accusing innocent people of a crime.

An appeal against the dismissal was rejected on 20 August 2025. The slander file remained open. The notification now received is the next step: an indictment.

The bank’s answer

Banca di San Marino has not accepted this narrative. In a statement in May 2025, after the latest complaint became public, the bank said it was the third criminal denunciation by Livio Bacciocchi, that the earlier ones had been archived, and that the accusations had been found unfounded. It pointed to judgments in its favour: a final Italian decision revoking as fraudulent an act by which the apartment in Riccione had been designated for the benefit of the children; Sammarinese decisions, confirmed through three degrees of judgment, revoking as fraudulent the transfer of the family home into a trust; and a 2014 enforceable title for large unpaid sums. The bank said it would continue to recover what it considers due.

That counter-story matters. Courts in San Marino have repeatedly treated the bank’s titles as enforceable. They have also treated some asset transfers by the Bacciocchi side as fraudulent attempts to put property beyond creditors.

In Italy, however, Banca di San Marino has also sought recognition and enforcement of the San Marino decrees obtained on the basis of the €6.6 million acknowledgment of debt, with a view to enforcing against the Riccione apartment. Those Italian enforcement proceedings are still being challenged.

The family’s point is narrower, and harder to dismiss by counting judgments. They do not say there has been a shortage of decisions. They say there has been a shortage of one decision: a full adversarial examination of the Framework Agreement, of the performances already carried out under it, and of whether the €6.6 million figure exists in the accounts of the company that claimed it. On that specific question, they say, the system has always pointed them somewhere else — tax first, then legal aid, then another case, then “res judicata” arising from the very summary ruling that had left the merits open. In almost 13 years, no judge has ever examined the content of the Framework Agreement.

Why the same names keep appearing

Judge Battaglino is not only the magistrate who dismissed the May 2025 complaint and opened the slander file. EUalive has already reported that he also issued key precautionary measures in the Starcom / Banca di San Marino acquisition dispute — the other case that brought San Marino’s justice system into the Brussels debate. Magistrate Francesco Santoni has likewise appeared in both files.

Overlap in a country of 34,000 people is not, by itself, proof of a plot. It is a structural fact. In a micro-state the same judges, the same bank, the same external counsel and the same supervisory bodies recur. That is why procedure matters more, not less. When the person who brings new accounting evidence is charged before that evidence is tested, the chilling effect does not stay inside one family file. Other lawyers, auditors and witnesses can see the cost of speaking.

Bacciocchi’s January letter already named that risk: “abuse of criminal proceedings by the judiciary, with deterrent and intimidating effects.” The indictment is the concrete form of the warning.

What this is — and what it is not

It is not for this site to say whether the €6.6 million debt exists. It is not for this site to say whether the elements of slander are made out. Those are questions for a court that is willing to look at the Framework Agreement, the 2011 accounts, the auditor’s testimony and the expert report in the same proceeding, with both sides able to test them.

What can be said is more limited, and already on the record.

A lawyer from San Marino asked European attention in January because she said no judge would examine the central contract. She repeated that claim in Brussels in February, in a debate that also concerned a Bulgarian investor and the same bank. Since then her father has moved from complainant to defendant on a slander charge born in the act that closed his complaint. Enforcement against the family, including the home in which Livio Bacciocchi lives with his wife and four children, has continued.

San Marino wants the benefits of closer union with Europe. Association is not a moral certificate. It is a commitment to the same basic idea the Bacciocchi letter put in one sentence: somewhere, and at some point, the substance of the dispute must be heard.

Until a court does that — on the contract, on the accounts, and on the slander charge itself — the latest indictment will look, to anyone who has followed this file, less like the end of a story than like the next turn of the same closed circuit.

Caption: From left to right, the panelists at the 5 February 2026 conference in Brussels: Dick Roche, former minister of European affairs of Ireland; Gérard Vespirerre, a researcher and author of a key report on micro-states in the EU; Assen Christov, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Starcom Holding; and Francesca Maria Bacciocchi, an attorney-at-law admitted to the Bar of the Republic of San Marino. [Photo credit: EUalive]