Punishable acts against patrimony as a result of breach of contract

Abstract

This paper wants to define criminal law’s field of work, in cases where a punishable act follows after a breach of contract. The applied methodology is descriptive with a qualitative approach, using the analysis of contents as a collection technique. In this respect, this investigation comes to the conclusion that the concept “patrimony” has different regulatory protection in civil- and criminal jurisdistion; in civil jurisdiction, patrimony includes all of the assets, but in criminal jurisdiction, the protection of the patrimony is limited to an integral part of it, except for cases of fraud, where the protection also covers the rights of expectations; in this order of ideas, it was possible to identify two punishable acts that might follow a breach of contract: fraud as a result of a voidable legal business, and breach of trust, caused by the violation of an asset management mandate agreement. At the end of the research, it was possible to define under what circumstances a breach of contract becomes a punishable act; in fraud cases the difference between civil and criminal intention is fundamental, and in cases of breach of trust, the existence of an asset management mandate agreement, as well as theintent to breach it, as a subjective element for its classification as offense.