A recent decision was issued by the Supreme Court (ΑΠ 1288/2025) regarding an application for annulment against a decision of the Athens Civil Court of Appeal in a case of civil fraud between relatives which was handled by our firm at all levels of jurisdiction. This case involves the annulment applicants, who obtained large sums of money from the annulment respondents-our clients (their second-degree relatives as opposing parties)-by pretending that they would sell them, as part of a quid pro quo arrangement, one of their real estate properties. The significance of this decision lies in the Supreme Court’s emphasis that fraud is not excluded even if the deceived parties are negligent. Specifically, the Supreme Court expressly rejects the annulment applicants’ claim that their false representations were not sufficient to deceive the annulment respondents, arguing that no contracting party in the usual course of business would advance the sale price without the prior execution of a notarial preliminary agreement or final contract, characterising this claim as unfounded, reiterating that “fraud is not excluded even if the deceived parties are negligent,” as in the present case where our clients paid significant amounts of money for this purpose without the necessary legal safeguards provided for in real estate transactions, being persuaded by the fraudulent concealments and false representations of the annulment applicants.
It is particularly worth noting that, with regard to the facts evaluated and assessed by the appellate court, the Supreme Court ruled that because the annulment applicants concealed from our clients the fact that their property intended for sale was encumbered with debts, and falsely presented to our clients that the purpose of selling their property was the expansion of their business operations in order to increase their turnover, while in fact their business was in significant decline, and that the property intended for sale would acquire greater market value in the future due to the relocation of governmental and parliamentary offices to the area, which was untrue, thus establishing fraud against them; the Supreme Court highlighted that fraud is not excluded even in the case of negligence of the deceived parties, as well as in relation to the future events mentioned, given that they were accompanied by false factual representations of other events occurring in the present time. It was therefore held that the appellate court, with its corresponding findings, correctly interpreted and thus applied the provision of Article 386 of the Penal Code while properly subsuming the above facts under the substantive provisions of Articles 330, 924, 297, 298 of the Civil Code and 386 of the Penal Code respectively, since they constitute the annulment applicants’ wrongful fraudulent conduct, specifically their unlawful and culpable behaviour (in the form of intent), which consists of a deliberate attempt to enrich themselves unlawfully, to the corresponding financial detriment of our clients, the annulment respondents, through the knowing representation of false facts as true and the improper concealment of true facts, insofar as such behaviour misled our clients into paying significant sums of money, which [conduct] is causally linked to the damage caused to them, as it was capable, according to the common experience, of leading to the aforementioned harmful outcome in the ordinary course of events, which it indeed caused in this case, and, consequently, the appellate court properly established our clients’, the annulment respondents’, claim for compensation from the annulment applicants, which it awarded to them.