Debtor does not need to be notified about credit assignment, decides Moura Ri...

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The assignment of credit is a deal between the creditor and the buyer of the debt and concerns them only. Therefore, Minister Moura Ribeiro, of the Superior Court of Justice, confirmed debt collection by assignee even without notification of the debtor. In a decision from April this year, the minister followed up on a company's appeal asking for the assignment contract to be declared valid.


Jorge Rosenberg
Moura Ribeiro overturned the TJ-SP decision and allowed the company to collect debts from consumers, obtained through the assignment of credit from other companies, without notification of assignment.
In 2010, the Public Ministry of São Paulo B2B Lead filed a public civil action against an investment fund specialized in purchasing debts, alleging that the company acquires unpaid debts, referring to consumer debts with companies such as those in the telephone industry, and collects these debts without the debtors being notified in advance about the assignment. In the event of non-payment of debts, the company takes the name of the debtors to the defaulter registers.

The MP requested that all credit assignments to the company be declared ineffective without notification with acknowledgment of receipt from debtors. The request was accepted by the São Paulo Court of Justice, which considered real, prior, formal and personal notification to the debtor to be essential, based on article 290 of the Civil Code.

In his decision, Moura Ribeiro recognized that acknowledgments of receipt from the debtor were unnecessary in cases of credit assignment. “Whether in a purely civil law relationship, or in a consumer relationship, the absence of notification from the assignee does not prevent the assignee from collecting the debt or from carrying out the acts necessary to maintain that same debt, such as registering the defaulting debtor in the credit protection registrations”, he stated.



The minister concluded that the acknowledgment of receipt does not have any relevant practical repercussions. “If the collection of the debt and the practice of the acts necessary for its conservation are not conditioned even on the existence of prior notification, it is unnecessary to add the fact that this notification lacks formalism or personality, nor does it restrict the creditor's freedom to promote the collection of the debt or the acts that it deems necessary to satisfy its credit.