Något (nytt?) om kompensationsspörsmålet vid bedrägeri

Sammanfattning

The doctrine of compensation within the statuary provision of fraud resides in a dark and dusty corner of Swedish criminal law. The recent years’ emergence of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on the market is posed to raise troublesome questions with regards to the application of fraudual compensation. This thesis examines the clash between the old doctrine and a newly established behavior on the marketplace. The assessments of whether a received good is deemed to sufficiently compensate a deceived party aims at serviceability. This application is ill-suited for the new order on the market, as a good with a deficiency in a promised CSR-quality, such as being more environmentally-friendly produced, does not necessarily provide the deceived party with something that is less serviceable than the promised good – a spade can still be used as a spade, regardless of how it was produced. A foundational argument for how the assessment has been conducted in the past is put into question and a change in the application of the compensational assessment is advocated. Since there still is no clear case law on how the compensational assessment should be carried out, as well as the fact that the matter has been lying practically dormant in the discourse since the 1960’s, the thesis argues that there is sufficient interpretative space to be found within the existing legal framework to provide for a different application of the compensational assessment by ways of a re-interpretation of fraudual harm.