Date of the decision: January 21, 2015
Jurisdiction: Court of Justice of the European Union
Country: Germany
Subject: Consumer protection; Evictions
Legal basis: Interpretation of Article 6 of Council Directive 93/13/EEC of 5 April 1993 on unfair terms in consumer contracts (OJ 1993 L 95, p. 29).
The requests have been made in proceedings between, (1) on the one hand, Unicaja Banco SA, and, on the other, Mr Hidalgo Rueda, Ms del Carmen Vega Martín, Gestión Patrimonial Hive SL, Mr López Reina and Ms Hidalgo Vega, (2) Caixabank SA, and, firstly, Mr Rueda Ledesma and Mr Mesa Mesa, secondly, Mr Labella Crespo, Mr Márquez Rodríguez, Mr Gallardo Salvat and Ms Márquez Rodríguez, and (3), Mr A. Galán Luna and Mr D. Galán Luna, concerning the recovery of unpaid debts arising from mortgage-loan contracts concluded between those parties in the main proceedings.
The cases in the main proceedings concern mortgage enforcement proceedings initiated by Unicaja Banco and Caixabank for the enforcement of several mortgages.
Article 6 of Council Directive 93/13/EEC of 5 April 1993 on unfair terms in consumer contracts must be interpreted as not precluding a national provision under which the national court hearing mortgage enforcement proceedings is required to adjust the amounts due under a term in a mortgage-loan contract providing for default interest at a rate more than three times greater than the statutory rate in order that the amount of that interest may not exceed that threshold, provided that the application of that national provision:
– is without prejudice to the assessment by that national court of the unfairness of such a term and
– does not prevent that court removing that term if it were to find the latter to be ‘unfair’, within the meaning of Article 3(1) of that directive.
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