This paper presents the development of creditor protection against legal actions in which the debtor diminishes property in favour of third parties and to the detriment of the creditor before or after the initiation of execution enforcement in Roman law with reference to the regulation in contemporary Croatian law. The introduction of the tort of creditor fraud (fraus creditorum) is attributed to the praetor and coincides with the time when the execution on debtor’s property became a regular form of enforcement. In order to protect the creditor, the praetor introduced the procedural means to refute the debtor’s legal actions – interdictum fraudatorium and the restitutio in integrum ob fraudem, and later the actio Pauliana, which combined the effects of the two previous remedies and gave creditors comprehensive protection. Although the name actio Pauliana is recorded in only two places in the sources of Roman law, which is related to the problem of dating, i.e. that it is not possible to determine with complete certainty who the lawsuit was named after, it is also used in modern legal terminology and denotes a lawsuit that the debtor’s legal actions to the creditor’s detriment are rejected. The Paulian action, i.e. the institution of voiding the debtor’s legal actions, was originally adopted from German law into Croatian law and is based on the principles developed in Roman law. The assumptions used in filing the original Paulian action were: impoverishment of the debtor, damage to the creditor, the debtor’s awareness of insolvency and damage to the creditor, and the debtor’s awareness of the same circumstances when intervening came to collect legal affairs. The aforementioned assumptions are incorporated into modern Croatian law with some (minor) changes. With regard to the regulation of this institute, since 1978, i.e. since its inclusion in the Obligations Act of 1978, the institute is no longer regulated by a special act such as the Act on the Refusal of Legal Acts Outside Bankruptcy Proceedings of January 22, 1931, but is part of the general part and act on the law of obligations. At the same time, it should be noted that modern Croatian law, in addition to rebuttal outside of bankruptcy proceedings, which is regulated by the Obligations Act, also regulates refutation in bankruptcy proceedings, namely by the Insolvency Act, which is not the object of analysis here. The importance of the institute, which essentially retained the features laid down in Roman law, but with the necessary adjustments to all special circumstances in order to adequately protect the interests of debtors and creditors, is reflected in the exceptional possibility for the creditor to void the transactions between the debtor and the third parties, while at the same time it contributes to the strengthening of the basic principle of the law of obligations – the principle of the duty to perform.