The role of a Director of a company can never be a pure formality

Even where the company belongs to a group and the director has only implemented decisions made by others sitting in the holding’s board.
This is the principle very recently established by the Italian Supreme Court (judgement n.5795 of 3.3.2021): a director would not escape liability if he has remained extraneous to the management of the company, allowing others to interfere in the mismanagement of the same. On the contrary, this behaviour realizes a culpable omission of the duties of diligently managing the relevant company for having allowed others to carry out business dealings in breach of the duty to preserve the integrity of the corporate assets.
Where a group is envisaged, a concurrent responsibility of the directors of the holding company would be triggered where they have in fact exercised the powers of the directors of the subsidiary, disregarding the autonomy of the latter and reducing its directors to mere executors of their orders.
In this scenario, the liability of the directors of the holding is added – without excluding it – to the liability of the directors of the subsidiary, if the latter have failed to fulfil their duties towards the subsidiary itself.