Supreme Court asks EU Court whether it can rule in general way on capping mortgage interest rates given the heterogeneity of the millions of cases involved in the conflict
The Supreme Court has decided to ask the European Justice whether it can make a general and final ruling on the conflict of the floor clauses that the bank applied to millions of mortgages until ten years ago by limiting the minimum interest that entities were allowed to charge customers, whether the Euribor was negative. The Supreme Court has referred a question to the Luxembourg Court when it questioned whether a ruling in Spain has the community support to clarify such an “abstract” issue through all kinds of mortgage deeds, terms, contracts and a heterogeneity of case histories such as this one. includes conflict.
The doubts of the Supreme Court, which has submitted this preliminary question to the CJEU, focus on the question whether the Civil Chamber finds support in the European guidelines for reaching such an abstract decision within a collective action (the macro- requirement of multiple organizations, such as Adicae) with «Clauses used by more than a hundred financial entities, in millions of bank contracts, without regard to the level of pre-contractual information offered about the legal and economic burden of the clause, nor the rest of the the concurrent circumstances in any case, at the time of hiring.
This diversity of cases is one of the reasons why the Supreme Court took the case to the Luxembourg Court, as it believes it is “extremely complex to conclude that an unequivocal transparency check can be performed on similar clauses.” The European Directives themselves determine that in order to carry out a transparency check of the terms of bank contracts, a specific examination of the contractual relationships of individuals must be carried out.
In addition, it ignores whether it is possible to take collective action such as that of the bottom clauses “against all entities that are part of a country’s banking system, whose only common denominator is that they use variable interest rates in their mortgage contracts. with more content clauses or less comparable.
Finally, she questions whether it is compatible to carry out an abstract control of transparency from the perspective of the average consumer when different contract offers target different specific groups of consumers or when there are multiple predisposing entities with very different economic and geographic business areas. , over a very long period of time during which public knowledge of such clauses developed.
After taking note of the Supreme Court resolution, Adicae has described it as “shameful”, more than 12 years since the “macro demand” was presented, which has two favorable resolutions in first and second instance, and with “millions consumers are still involved at all levels in the courts, which is a very serious obstacle to the functioning of the judiciary».
The legal journey of the macro-demand filed by this organization against 101 banks and savings banks for the bottom clauses adds a new chapter after the Supreme Court already postponed its decision in early June. The injunction published a month ago opened a further 10-day deadline to raise some questions from the parties to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). So until the doctrine is known there will be no vote or verdict.
After more than twenty appellants submitted memorandums showing that they agreed with the approach to the questions referred for a preliminary ruling, after Adicae objected to the request for a preliminary ruling and after the prosecutor stated that it did not consider it necessary in order to lift the preliminary ruling, the Supreme Court has decided to turn to Luxembourg to clarify a matter that has not yet been decided.
This latest Supreme Court turn of events further delays one of the most anticipated rulings from those affected by these kinds of abuse provisions. Especially to put an end to years of judicial ups and downs, as the CJEU recently laid the foundations itself so that data subjects can claim all the money they overpaid for these clauses, even if they already had final judgments in which only the repayment of part of those amounts, as dictated at the time by the Spanish doctrine at the time, with 2013 being the date on which restitution could be claimed.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
