A new perspective on the protected legal good in the crime of misrepresentation in corporate documents

Abstract

After classifying the crime of misrepresentation in annual accounts and other corporate documents within crimes against the socioeconomic order rather than within crimes against property and after defining it as a crime of misrepresentation rather than of fraud, we sought to identify the protected legal good in this first corporate crime, coming to the conclusion that said legal good is constituted exclusively by the functionality of the documents in which the misrepresentation has been made, so rejecting the idea that this is a multiple-offence crime and that the law is protecting the principal legal goods cited in most scientific and jurisprudential doctrine, namely property and its security, and the right to true and complete information, among other possible directly protected interests.