Legal Working Group blog
Members of the Legal Working Group met in Paris on Monday 15th December 2008. The meeting was hosted by the French IUCAB Member Association FNAC.
Important attention was focussed on reviewing and amending the draft of a paper that can possibly serve as the basis for the starting up of IUCAB lobbying initiatives towards an amendment of Art. 5 of EC Regulation 44/2001 in such a way that commercial agents in Europe will be entitled to bring claims before the Courts of their Country regardless whether the Agency Contract contains a clause according to which the Courts of the Country in which the Principal is established have exclusive jurisdiction.
The revised version of this paper shall be presented to the Members of the Executive Committee on the occasion of its assembly in Amsterdam on 23rd March 2009. Next to the above relevant recent case law and reports were exchanged and discussed such as:
- The opinion of the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice of 19th November 2008 in the reference for a preliminary ruling from the “Landgericht” Hamburg (Germany) in the case Turgay Semen versus Deutsche Tamoil GmbH;
- case law of the Italian Supreme Court establishing the principle of a “guaranteed minimum”, according to which, at the termination of the Agency Contract the commercial agent is at least entitled to the indemnity provided by the AEC, and to the higher amount provided by the Italian Civil Code, whenever the commercial agent is able to give evidence that the conditions set forth in that article are fulfilled;
- judgement from the Swiss Supreme Court of 22th May 2008 according to which a distributor may, under certain circumstances, successfully claim payment of a goodwill indemnity;
- EC Regulation 593/2008 of 17th June 2008 which shall replace the 1980 Rome Convention on the law applicable to contractual obligations;
- the English High Court decision of 23rd April 2008 confirming the leading judgement of the English House of Lords in the Lonsdale Case regarding the calculation of compensation under the UK Commercial Agency Regulations.
