If a woman has sacrificed her career to look after the family, she is entitled to a maintenance allowance. This is what the Genoa Court of Appeal decided, which rejected the request of a professional who asked for the revocation of the allowance for his ex-wife. The woman, assisted by the lawyer Liana Maggiano, demonstrated before the judges that she worked part time for ten years after the birth of her daughter and thus lost part of her salary, social security contributions and even career advancements.
For the Genoese Court of Appeal “in the recognition and determination of the divorce allowance with the welfare function, the compensatory-equalization function contributes” under certain conditions “, when it is necessary to compensate one of the spouses for the particular contribution that proves to have given to the management of family life and to the formation of the common patrimony or of the other spouse during married life, sacrificing one’s own concrete professional expectations “.
The story started in 2016 when the Genoa court sentenced the husband to pay a divorce allowance to his wife on the basis of the standard of living. In 2017 the Supreme Court had intervened and had eliminated this criterion and so the former had appealed. The court of appeal had confirmed the allowance to the woman with “personalized” criteria since the 2017 Supreme Court did not define the criteria for paying or not to pay the allowance. Her husband had challenged in the Supreme Court, and in the meantime in 2018 the United Sections defined the criteria on the basis of which to grant or deny the divorce allowance.