The Supreme Court condemns a man who obtained his ex-wife's bank details by deceit to sue her

Clarifies that anyone has the right to have their banking information protected from their ex-spouse

MADRID, 28 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The Supreme Court (TS) has sentenced a man who deceitfully obtained his ex-wife's bank details to sue her for a crime of discovery and disclosure of secrets, as well as a fine of 2,700 euros. the objective of claiming the amounts derived from the gifts of the wedding list.

The Criminal Chamber has upheld the appeal filed by the woman against the ruling of the Provincial Court of Alicante that acquitted the man of the crime of discovery and disclosure of secrets for which a court in Elche had sentenced him to the confirmed sentence Now for the Supreme.

According to the Second Chamber, after the divorce process, the man filed a civil lawsuit against his ex-wife in which he attached bank statements from her account issued when he had ceased to be co-owner of it three years before.

The sentence, presented by magistrate Manuel Marchena, sees in it a crime of discovery and disclosure of secrets, distancing himself from the provincial court, which exonerated the man considering that the bank details provided to the civil lawsuit did not provide intimate information about the woman, such as It could be where, how or with whom you spent that money, but only reflected a few provisions through cash withdrawals.

The Supreme Court clarifies that "anyone has the right to have information about their current account movements, in a period that lasted for more than a year, be protected from their ex-spouse."

"The information contained in these extracts responds to the notion of confidential data of a personal nature whose seizure, by itself, constitutes the crime provided for in article 197.2 of the Penal Code," he says.

The high court emphasizes that "the privacy linked to that information does not need complementary location references --where that money was spent-- or of a subjective nature --with whom that money was spent--".

"Taked to its ultimate consequences, this reasoning could be understood to mean that the criminal protection of privacy linked to bank details is only dispensed at the time of spending, or that the husband has the right to control the ownership and amount of the assets he has. his ex-spouse and he is only forbidden from knowing with whom or where his amount has been spent", he explains.

However, the Second Chamber concludes that the man committed said crime by pretending to the bank that he was the owner of a checking account for which he was no longer authorized, thus causing "harm to the owner, who does not have to identify himself with economic damage."

The Supreme Court specifies that the damage flows from the proven fact itself, in which a conjugal relationship is described whose deterioration is the best example of the existence of a judicial procedure to claim the amounts derived from the gifts on the wedding list.

"Understanding that the seizure of these data did not offer a strategic benefit to the defendant, with the correlative damage to (the ex-wife), would mean dispensing with the purpose that motivated the fraudulent obtaining of the bank movements", ditch.