The Real Payment Offer and the Consignation, in the Old and New Romanian Civil Code

The real payment offer and the consignation are legal forms of voluntary payment, which can be defined as the manifestation of will of the payment obligation's debtor by means of which he executes, on his own initiative and in kind the pecuniary obligation undertaken, regardless of whether the obligational legal relation is national or has an extraneity element. In other words, the payment defines that operation by means of which an obligation to issue a certain amount of money to the creditor is voluntarily executed by the debtor, in view of terminating the obligational legal relation, with or without extraneity element. Still, the debtor must resort to the institution of the real payment offer and consignation only if he is faced with the creditor's reticence in receiving the payment or he is in a fortuitous impossibility to accept it. The reason why the lawmaker made such an institution available to the debtor is given by the fact that the creditor's refusal to accept payment may be due to his intention to charge penalties on the debtor for his late payment. Even in the situation when the creditor would be in a fortuitous impossibility to receive the payment, this fact cannot create an advantageous situation for him, in relation to the debtor of the payment obligation, person from whom he can ask penalties for the delayed making of the payment.