THE TRUST UNDER ROMANIAN LAW. FORM OF PATRIMONY SPLIT FOR NATURAL AND LEGAL PERSONS

The trust represents, according to the father of English modern legal history, Frederic William Maitland, „the greatest and most distinctive achievement performed by Englishmen in the field of jurisprudence”. Its special flexibility, has transformed the trust, initially linked with the common law systems, into a legal instrument adopted and integrated, specifically during the last few years, under civil law systems with which, previously, it has been deemed to be incompatible. The objective of this study is to review to which extent the trust is present and/or may be integrated under Romanian law, considering the modernist split patrimony theory introduced by the Romanian legislation under the Civil Code, as of its October 1st, 2011, its entry into force date. The research methods that we envisage using are the following: the comparative analysis, through which we aim at reflecting the legal existence of the trust under various legal systems, specifically the common law systems, and the economic analysis within which we propose to describe the economic reasons for which the trust is so widely used in the international business arena. We assess that the importance of this study is considerably greater in the international environment of the sole European and world wide market under which the existence of legal instruments (such as the trust) accessible to certain persons (natural, but more specifically legal persons) and out of reach to others, confers the former with a major competitive advantage