On March 16, 2023, the Court of Justice of the European Union issued a judgment in a case registered
under case number C-6/22, following preliminary questions submitted by the District Court for
Warsaw-Wola in a case against the former Getin Noble Bank S.A. In the judgment, the CJEU ruled
that:
(i) in the event that a contract concluded between a consumer and a seller or supplier is declared
invalid because one of its terms is unfair, it is for the Member States, by means of their
national law, to make provision for the effects of that invalidation, in compliance with the
protection granted to the consumer by that directive, in particular, by ensuring the
restoration of the legal and factual situation that he or she would have been in if that unfair
term had not existed;
(ii) a national court is not allowed:
a. to examine of its own motion, without any prerogative conferred on it by national law in
that regard, the financial situation of a consumer who has sought the invalidation of the
contract between him or her and a seller or supplier on account of the presence of an
unfair term without which the contract cannot legally continue to exist, even if that
invalidation is liable to expose the consumer to particularly unfavourable consequences
and
b. to refuse to declare that invalidation where the consumer has expressly sought it, after
being objectively and exhaustively informed of the legal consequences and the
particularly unfavourable financial consequences which it may have for him or her;
(iii) a national court is not allowed, after it has found that a term in a contract concluded between
a seller or supplier and a consumer is unfair, to fill gaps resulting from the removal of the
unfair term contained therein by the application of a provision of national law which cannot
be characterised as a supplementary provision. However, it is for the national court, taking
account of its domestic law as a whole, to take all the measures necessary to protect the
consumer from the particularly unfavourable consequences which annulment of the contract
might entail for him or her.
On June 8, 2023, the Court of Justice of the European Union issued a judgment in a case registered
under case number C-570/21, following preliminary questions submitted by the District Court in
Warsaw in a case against the former Getin Noble Bank S.A. In the judgment, the CJEU ruled that:
(i) provisions of Council Directive 93/13 must be interpreted as meaning that the concept of
‘consumer’, within the meaning of that provision, covers a person who has concluded a loan
contract intended for a purpose in part within and in part outside his or her trade, business
or profession, together with a joint-borrower who did not act within his or her trade, business
or profession, where the trade, business or professional purpose is so limited as not to be
predominant in the overall context of that contract;
(ii) provisions of Directive 93/13 must be interpreted as meaning that in order to determine
whether a person falls within the concept of ‘consumer’, within the meaning of that provision,
and, specifically, whether the trade, business or professional purpose of a loan contract
concluded by that person is so limited as not to be predominant in the overall context of that
contract, the referring court is required to take into consideration all the relevant
circumstances surrounding that contract, both quantitative and qualitative, such as, in
particular, the distribution of the borrowed capital between, on the one hand, a trade,
business or profession and, on the other hand, a non-professional activity and, where there
are several borrowers, the fact that only one of them is pursuing a professional purpose or
that the lender made the grant of credit intended for consumer purposes conditional on a
partial allocation of the amount borrowed to the repayment of debts connected with a trade,
business or profession.