EU

The possibility of an EU-wide framework for collective redress is approaching with the closing of the European Commission’s call for evidence on the implementation of the Commission’s Recommendation 2013/396/EU (the “Recommendation”) on 15 August 2015. The Commission will now proceed to formulate its report (the “Report”).

The Report is intended to gather together information about practical experience of collective redress systems across the EU, as the Commission is concerned to determine whether current systems are effective in giving consumers access to justice and enable them to recover damages in the context of: consumer protection, competition, environment, personal data, financial services and investor protection. The evidence collected will be used to determine whether legislative steps at EU level are required in order to impose a minimum procedural standard for collective action regimes in the EU.  Although the 2013 Recommendation set out common principles for injunctive and compensatory collective redress mechanisms, it was non-binding.

The UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal (“CAT”) has refused to certify the £14 billion consumer class claim brought against Mastercard under the English class action regime introduced in October 2015. This is the second collective action filed under that regime and both have failed at this first hurdle in the procedure.  However, this does not necessarily signal that the regime cannot be used for appropriate cases and on behalf of carefully designed classes of claimant. The…

“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”. This is probably the most famous sentence from George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Sixty-two  years after its first publication (on 17 August 1945), the Court of Appeal in Amsterdam had to decide whether this also applies to the beneficiaries of a collective settlement under the Act for the Collective Settlement of Mass Claims (Wet collective afwikkeling massaschade or “Wcam” for short). Fortis Group was a Dutch/Belgium…

The Dutch Act on Collective Settlements (Wet collectieve afwikkeling massaschade or “Wcam”) was introduced in 2005 and revised in 2013. It offers the possibility to get a declaration that a settlement is binding on the entire class (as defined in the settlement agreement), much like a U.S. class settlement. Despite its existence for over a decade, there are hardly any precedents on it from the Supreme Court. The reason for that is probably that only…

The Netherlands will get a collective action for monetary damages, not dissimilar to a US-style class action. The government placed a bill to that effect before Parliament on 15 November 2016. However, the Netherlands are keen to avoid what is widely seen, at least in this country, as the downside of class action litigation: blackmail settlements, because of the reputational risk and prohibitive cost of defense that a class action involves, and plaintiff’s lawyers receiving the bulk of the proceeds, whereas little money goes to the aggrieved parties.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (the “Second Circuit”) in New York has vacated and reversed a $147 million antitrust verdict against a Chinese vitamin C manufacturer and its holding company, ruling that the district court should have granted Defendants’ original motion to dismiss. The case represents the first time an agency of the Chinese government, MOFCOM, appeared as amicus in a U.S. court to inform the U.S. court of applicable Chinese law, an occasion which the Court of Appeals called historic.

Plaintiffs, U.S. vitamin C purchasers, brought a class action on behalf of all such purchasers alleging that Defendant Chinese manufacturers violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act with the “purpose and effect of fixing prices, controlling the support of vitamin C to be exported to the United States and worldwide ….” They asserted that Defendants and the China Chamber of Commerce of Medicines & Health Products Importers & Exporters (the “Chamber”) colluded in order to create a vitamin C shortage in the international market, and that Defendants and the Chamber entered into agreements to restrict exports of vitamin C by limiting production and increasing pricing. According to plaintiffs, this had the effect of creating the shortage and maintaining China’s status as a leading exporter.

A class action law was first enacted in Italy in 2009 (Art. 49 of Law no. 99 of 23 July 2009, hereinafter the “Class Action Law”, in force as of 2010). In 2012 the Class Action Law was amended so as to expand its scope and so to protect the contractual rights of a number of consumers and users that find themselves in homogeneous situations (whereas the previous wording required the situations to be identical),…

Recently, the Dutch Supreme Court handed down three judgments that provide additional guidance as to when a collective action may be used, for what and with what effect. The first case makes clear that a collective actions tolls the statute of limitations, not only for the vehicle (an association or foundation) that acts as plaintiff, but also for the members of the group that it represents. This is the case even, if the claim in…

FRANCE – Class actions were almost inexistent in France before their introduction in French law by the Statute n°2014-344 of March 17, 2014. The key aspects of this new law have already been outlined in our previous post dated 28 January 2015. The following aims at presenting the only 6 class actions brought before the courts since the implementation of the statute in October 2014 and the foreseeable development of the class and collective actions…