From Sustainability Reporting to Corporate Accountability: EU Regulation Against Greenwashing and the Armani Case

This thesis examines how the European Union has converted corporate sustainability from a voluntary commitment into an enforceable legal obligation, and asks whether the resulting framework can close the gap between what companies communicate and what they demonstrably do. It reconstructs the passage from soft law to hard law, culminating in the Taxonomy Regulation, the CSRD and the CSDDD, and assesses the retrenchment introduced by the Omnibus Package of 2025. It then analyses greenwashing and social washing and situates them within Directive (EU) 2024/825. The framework is tested against the Armani case, in which the Italian Competition and Market Authority found the Group’s ethical and social statements to constitute an unfair commercial practice. The case is read as an instance of organisational decoupling within fragmented subcontracting chains, a pattern confirmed across the Italian luxury sector. An exploratory questionnaire completes the analysis. The findings indicate that accountability in complex value chains cannot be delegated to market pressure: consumers can sanction misconduct once exposed, but lack the information to detect it independently. Independent verification therefore emerges as the decisive variable, and its weakening under the Omnibus Package as the most consequential recent revision.