Admission for Processing of a Criminal Complaint (Querella) for Unfair Administration and Accounting Fraud

Our client was reported by the opposing party for an alleged offence of misappropriation of 30,000 euros, in the context of corporate disagreements that arose around a company that would ultimately be declared insolvent. In response to this complaint, rather than limiting ourselves to a purely reactive defence, we began a thorough analysis of the company's accounts for the financial years between 2010 and 2023, the year insolvency proceedings were declared.

That accounting analysis produced a result radically different from the one on which the original complaint was based: far from there being any financial harm caused by our client, the objective examination of the accounts revealed a commercial loss of 600,000 euros in favour of the complaining party — a figure that showed an economic relationship the reverse of the one being asserted. On this basis, we filed a criminal complaint (querella) against the complainant for an offence of unfair administration, also aimed at bringing to light indications of misappropriation, procedural fraud and falsification of the company's accounts.

Before admitting the criminal complaint (querella) for processing, and before taking a statement from the person under investigation, the Court required us to specify precisely the reasonable indications of the offence of falsification of accounts on which our claim was based — a requirement we met by providing the technical detail of the accounting analysis carried out.

The result was the admission for processing of our criminal complaint, opening the way to criminal proceedings against the person who had initially sought to place our client in the position of the person under investigation, and laying the groundwork to establish, in the subsequent stages of the proceedings, the offences of unfair administration, misappropriation, procedural fraud and accounting fraud brought to light by our analysis.