Stručni rad
https://doi.org/10.65342/door.2.1.4
The Attorney as the Perpetrator of the Criminal Offence of Breaching Trust to the Detriment of their own Client
Tomislav Šimić
Sažetak
The paper analyses a final and binding criminal case in which an attorney was convicted of the aggravated form of the criminal offence of breach of trust under Article 240, paragraph 2, of the Croatian Criminal Code, committed to the detriment of his own client. The case is of legal interest from the perspective of substantive criminal law, as it raises the question of whether an attorney's success in a particular phase of out-of-court representation may exculpate him from criminal liability for the subsequent retention of funds received on behalf of the client; from the perspective of procedural criminal law, as it opens an insufficiently elaborated question concerning the scope of the parties' agreement on the type and measure of the penalty under Article 417a of the Croatian Criminal Procedure Act in relation to security measures imposed by the court based on its official duty; and from the perspective of the imposition of sanctions, as the first-instance court imposed the security measure of prohibition on practising law for the statutory maximum duration of ten years, providing reasons as to why the perpetrator's removal from the Register of Attorneys at his or her own request, effected prior to the delivery of the judgment, does not eliminate the risk of reoffending. The analysis is based on the judgment of the Municipal Court in Zadar, case number K-331/17 of 22 December 2017, and the confirmatory judgment of the County Court in Dubrovnik, case number Kž-39/2018-3 of 27 January 2020.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
347827
URI
Datum izdavanja:
15.6.2026.
Posjeta: 103 *