The Supreme Court has sentenced a divorced man to a year and a half in prison for having obtained by deception his ex-wife's bank details to claim money from the wedding list.
The now convicted, once the divorce process had finished, had sued his ex-partner "to claim the amounts derived from the gifts from the wedding list", for which he presented bank statements from her account issued when he already he had ceased to be co-owner of it three years before.
The court understands that this entailed a violation of the privacy of the ex-spouse, because the bank details are "reserved data of a personal nature", regardless of whether it provides information on "where, how or with whom you spend" the money.
The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court has upheld the woman's appeal and has revoked the acquittal issued by the Provincial Court of Alicante.
This, in turn, had upheld an appeal by the man and had annulled the initial sentence imposed by a court in Elche, which sentenced (as now the high court) the ex-husband to one year and six months in prison for discovering and revealing secrets. .
The woman had denounced him for having obtained without her permission, and with deceit in the branch, bank account details, when I had not shared it for years.
The Court understood to exculpate the man that the data he attached to the civil lawsuit "did not provide intimate information about the complainant, such as where, how or with whom she spends that money, but only reflected a few provisions through cash refunds "
Manuel Marchena, president of the room and rapporteur for the sentence, rejects this argument of the Court, understanding that it is as much as saying 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 available to his ex-spouse and is only prohibited from knowing with whom or where the amount has been spent”.
On the contrary, Marchena understands that "anyone has the right to have information about the movements of their checking account, in a period that lasted for more than a year, be protected from their ex-spouse."
In his opinion, "the information contained in these extracts responds to the notion of private data of a personal nature whose seizure, by itself, constitutes the crime."
The ex-husband, according to the Supreme Court, obtained the data of what was her partner "faking before the bank the ownership of a checking account for which he was no longer authorized", a conduct that, according to the sentence, "caused damage to its owner, who does not have to identify himself with economic damage”.
The damage to her, in this case, "flows from the proven fact itself, which describes a conjugal relationship whose deterioration is best shown by the existence of a legal proceeding to claim the amounts derived from the gifts on the wedding list ”.
And with the bank details, Marchena understands that the man obtained "a strategic benefit [in the case], with the correlative damage to the ex-wife."