called fraud by means of deceitful non-disclosure (Swedish: bedrägeri genom svikligt förtigande), which was a behavior characterized by the fact that the middleman was deceived by the swindler’s silence.418 Hägerström concluded that Sterzel’s conclusion was facilitated by the prevalent opinion that acts of omission can function causatively, and trigger a chain of events eventually resulting in the completion of fraud.The reason is that according to theory the non-disclosure of facts (silence, concealment and so on), provided that the deceiver is under an obligation to prevent the fraudulent effect, is a causative act. Accordingly, what the criminally fraudulent non-disclosure revolves around is the existence of an obligation to inform the intended victim of a distortion of the truth.419 Hägerström’s analysis of Sterzel’s construction of so-called fraudulent non-disclosure necessarily implied that Sterzel had actually constructed a new legal concept, the crime of fraudulent non-disclosure, which was fraud by means of the non-disclosure of facts of a specific type relating to information of a certain nature. But while fraudulent conduct and its punishment stood in a causal relationship, the problem was that according to the Swedish penal code the fraudulent non-disclosure and punishment lacked any such connections.420 For according to the penal code fraudulent conduct constituted the criminal prerequisite for the legal implementation of the punishment in question, while on the other hand non-disclosure was permitted according to the wording of the Swedish penal law (dispite how morally reprehensible, disloyal, and intrinsically “fraudulent” the act might have been to its nature). Hägerström thus concluded that it was only the penal liability for fraudulent conduct that was legal according to positive Swedish penal law. p a r t v i , c h a p t e r 7 508 418 Sterzel, Bidrag till läran om bedrägeribrottet, p. 96. 419 Ibid., pp. 60-69 and 97-126. 420 Hägerström, “Svikligt förtigande,” p. 334.
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