By: Andrés López
Usually, Commercial Law is conceived, in general, as the set of rules related to merchants and commerce acts. In Guatemala, merchants are considered persons who exercise in their own name and lucrative purposes, those activities related to production industries or transformation of goods and service rendering intermediation, banking, insurance, finance, and all activities related to these, and if the activity is included in any of these, it has a commercial character, and consequently is regulated by the Commerce Code and other commercial laws within the country.
These contracts can be classified into two types, the typical ones, are those whose structure, object, formal, personal, and material elements are regulated in the commercial law, always respecting, and governed by the autonomy of the will of the parties that agree on them.
And on the other hand, the atypical ones, which are those that are not explicitly regulated in the regulations, therefore, they resort to the uses and customs, both of the commerce acts within the territory and internationally, but which, like any contract, consist of creating, modifying or extinguishing an obligation, at the emergence moment of a determined legal relationship.
Specifically, the Sale purchase agreement is regulated by Decree 2-70 of the Congress, Code of Commerce, and in a supplementary way what is applicable in the civil regulation from where it comes, and consists of the typical contract that has as purpose to facilitate the traffic and commerce of goods and services in Guatemala, within the production chain until reaching the final consumer, existing partial sales in the whole process. Therefore, we could indicate that its personal elements are the seller, the buyer, and the carrier.
The elements or characteristics of every Sale purchase agreement are bilateral, onerous, consensual, principal, commutative, and transfer of ownership. The Sale purchase agreement operates in such a way that when the parties have consensually agreed on a place, thing, and price, the ownership and peaceful possession of a thing or rendering of a service is transferred, and the buyer’s consideration is only the payment of the agreed price in the established form and term.