The Supreme Court (SC) has sent the case back for reconsideration to the Riga District Court, in which a woman was acquitted of charges of transferring money after a person's death, the court's press service reported.
The prosecution in the first instance court was brought against the woman for accessing her husband's online banking after his death and transferring 16,000 euros to her bank account. These actions bypassed the order of inheritance and prevented the children of the deceased husband from claiming the full inheritance that had opened up.
Both the first instance court and the appellate court recognized that the accused was effectively managing her husband's accounts and handling them like an accountant, having access to the login data for these accounts. In other words, she was innocent in her actions.
The Supreme Court judges disagreed with this interpretation. The Supreme Court established that the appellate court, by joining the reasoning of the first instance court's decision, failed to assess the evidence pointed out by the prosecutor in the appellate protest — a bank statement that could have been significant for clarifying the circumstances of the transfer of funds from the deceased's bank account.
The appellate court did not evaluate the prosecutor's arguments that this evidence indicates: the transfer from the deceased's account was the first monetary deposit into the accused's account, from which the bank also withheld a fee for opening the account. Therefore, the payment from the deceased's account could only have been made with the participation of the accused.
The court also indicated that the appellate court did not take into account that the violation of protected interests occurs at the moment actions are taken with money in someone else's bank account without legal grounds. Since inheritance opens at the moment of the testator's death, such actions reduce the inheritance mass, the property of which, until the division of the inheritance, is foreign to everyone, thereby violating the interests of heirs and creditors.
The Supreme Court also noted that the court unjustifiably deviated from the legal conclusions established in the Supreme Court's case law, according to which there is no need to prove the specific motive for actions with another person's monetary funds, and deemed them inapplicable in this case without providing a reasoned explanation for such a deviation.
