Criminal liability of legal entities in the legislation of Republic of Moldova

Despite their “vulnerable” existence, the nature of the legal entities, or, to say it in other words, their foundation have interested the doctrine and, separately, even the jurisprudence, different explanations being offered, some of them audacious, but, anyway, without saying that the discussion was finally closed. The legislation of Republic of Moldova recognizes legal entities as subjects of Criminal Law, the advantages and problems of this field we want to analyze. Thus, in the specialty literature there were emphasized a series of theories regarding the legal personality of a group. In this sense, there may be mentioned the theory of the fiction, which treats only the natural person as a veritable subject of law, the legal person being just an artificial form created by the legislator. Another vision is the theory of the precise realty, which supposes the fact that, both in the case of the natural person and in the case of the legal person there is present the formation of a will – the same as a characteristic of the subject of law – it is being realized and manifested. Thus, it is considered that the group of persons has a collective consciousness and, moreover, a collective will, different from that of its members, and which not a simple sum of wills is. A quite different direction is offered by the theory of the technical reality, which places at the basis of the legal person the “interest”, and the group made in this way is nothing else that a “collective property”, a “property of affectation”, of goods “affected” by a purpose of general interest. 

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