The ruling of the Court of Appeal of Bologna: the woman has two minor children and her husband worked in a car dealership. The Parma court had accepted the family’s arguments but the first verdict was overturned
To add insult to injury. A widow, mother of two minor childrenwill have to return 200 thousand euros to the insurance company that had been condemned at first instance pay the premium for the death of her husband.
The man, who worked in the business of selling cars in a dealership, he passed away on March 27, 2020 due to complications due to Covidand the Court of Parma had accepted the arguments of the family’s lawyer, the lawyer Francesca Barbuti. However, colleagues from the Court of Appeal of Bologna have a different opinion and have completely the first instance sentence overturned, fully agreeing with the insurance.
Death from Covid and insurance policy compensation
The widow was also sentenced to pay approximately 24 thousand euros in legal costs, in addition to the refund of the entire sum. The court cases relating to compensation from insurance companies for customers who died from Covid undoubtedly represent a novelty for the Italian jurisprudence which is not at all univocal in the decisions of the various courts.
In this case the lawyer and the woman are considering whether or not to appeal to the Supreme Court against the decisions of judges Fiore, Rossi and Gaudioso of the Bolognese Court of Appeal for which: «Evidently, in the hypothesis of Covid-19 it is not so much the cause that is violent, but rather the effect and, therefore, if the viral infection, while having a violent effectis not the consequence of a violent cause, then the Covid-19 virus infection cannot be included in the notion of accident, referred to in the insurance policy”.
The policy stipulated years earlier was a normal one life insurance policy that compensates for accidents but clearly Covid had not been foreseen by any insurance contract before 2020. The question, entirely legal-interpretative, is decisive in order to establish whether the policy integrates, or excludes, Covid from the list of indemnifiable risks.
The sentence: a widowed woman must repay 200,000 euros
From this point of view, the Court of Cassation recently established that «In private insurance it does not matter what an infection is from a clinical point of view, but what matters the parties to the contract wanted it to be”. And in fact the parties to a contract are very free to call the facts they believe best by the name they want. The Bolognese judges followed this reasoning and wrote in their sentence: «When interpreting the contract, the judge’s task is to reconstruct a will, not to define a concept».
Therefore, for the purposes of the onset of contractual obligations, nothing prevents the parties from defining an illness as an injury or an injury as an illness. Nothing prevents them, that is, from considering, for the purposes of contractual obligations, a certain event such as an accident or illnessat their sole discretion and regardless of the objective nature of that fact.
For the Court of Appeal of Bologna in practice, «anyone who contracts an infectious disease gets sick, not injured”. From this interpretation the sentence of conviction against the woman who will have to repay the 200 thousand euros, plus legal fees. It couldn’t have gone any worse.
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