According to a ruling of August 3, 2005, case file 1909, the Supreme Court of Justice defines the Autonomous Estate as those that, as a general rule, have a transitory life of their own but are intended to become definitive when they come to belong to a natural or legal person, to fulfill a purpose, or to be part of a specific application or allocation. That is to say, this type of estate has rights and obligations, constituting a legal universality in that they answer with their assets for their liabilities. This is in line with the Commercial Code, Article 1234, numeral 4, which shows that the legal entity is the trustee and will be responsible for the protection and defense of all assets delivered by the settlor in favor of the beneficiary against the actions of third parties.
Now then, the above is clearly evidenced when we review the generic conception of the Commercial Trust, which is defined as the legal transaction carried out by the trustor or settlor, whereby the latter transfers one or more of their assets to another trustee, obliging the latter to administer or dispose of them to comply with the instructions and thereby favor the beneficiary or cestui que trust (the trustor and beneficiary may be the same person at the same time).
Having understood these two figures, we can then understand why the Council of State, in a ruling of March 1, 2018, declared that it is null and void to impose sanctions on a trust company as the seller of assets of an autonomous estate, since the autonomous estate formed through the commercial trust, despite being subject to the legal transactions entered into by the trustee by reason of what was entrusted by the settlor in said contract, will never be a natural or legal person.
Any sanction on the figure of the Commercial Trust must be directed at the legal universality of the autonomous estate and not at the trust company, since the latter only participates in the legal transaction attending to the purposes and interests created through the autonomous estate and performing functions of a mandate contract type, without pursuing any kind of self-interest.