Dismissal is lawful where the employee is on leave with false medical certificates

Dismissal is lawful where an employee produces false medical certificates to justify an absence. This was stated by the Court of Cassation in judgment no. 8925/2015. The employer – on the basis of the serious conduct of the employee, who had tried to justify two days of absence with unlawful medical certificates – had brought the employment relationship definitively to an end. The criminal investigation – On this point the Court of Appeal had stressed that the employer had been right to wait for the criminal investigation to develop before assessing the merit of the allegation for the purposes of justifying the dismissal, and that the intensity of the intent, arising from the use of fraudulent methods for which the employee had received a criminal conviction upheld on appeal, led to her being regarded as an unreliable person, so that the dismissal was to be considered justified. In this way, in the presence of a criminal conviction, the employer had everything needed to show that a relationship of trust with the employee could no longer exist. The criminal investigation – The seriousness of the allegation – The Court of Cassation, moreover, recalled that the appeal judges had not failed to carry out an independent assessment of the seriousness of the disciplinary charges brought. This was done in a properly reasoned decision, free of logical or legal flaws, which highlighted the intensity of the intent inferable from the fraudulent methods, such as the use of falsified certificates, methods which led to the conclusion that the person who had used them was unreliable. The dismissal therefore appeared justified precisely because the person concerned was capable of committing unlawful acts in order to obtain advantages of minor importance, such as avoiding work during short absences. The employee’s argument that the provisions of the national collective bargaining agreement, under which the conduct should have been punished with a conservative sanction, had not been taken into account was of no avail. On this point the answer of the Court of Cassation was firm: it denied the employee that possibility because, in the appeal, the employee had merely reproduced a short passage of the agreement cited, which was wholly insufficient to call into question the sanction imposed, which had already been held lawful in the proceedings on the merits. The seriousness of the allegation –