Nesąžininga komercinė veikla ir vartotojo ekonominiai interesai

LTStraipsnyje analizuojamos vartotojo ekonominių interesų gynimo galimybės, kai verslininkas vartotojo atžvilgiu vykdo nesąžiningą komercinę veiklą. Straipsnyje atskleidžiama, kad nesąžiningą komercinę veiklą reguliuojantys teisės aktai individualaus vartotojo ekonominių interesų negina. Straipsnio autorius analizuoja, kokias vis dėlto galimybes turės individualus vartotojas, siekiantis apginti savo dėl nesąžiningos komercinės veiklos pažeistus ekonominius interesus, ir su kokioms kliūtimis jis galimai susidurs.

ENOn 11 May 2005 the European Parliament and the Council adopted Directive 2005/29/EC concerning unfair business-to-consumer commercial practices in the internal market (hereinafter - the Directive). The Directive applies to both goods and services, to all sectors and all marketing and selling methods. In Lithuania the Directive has been transposed almost literally into Law on Prohibition of Unfair Business-to-Consumer Commercial Practices. The Directive contains a general unfairness clause and also regulates misleading commercial practices (misleading actions and misleading omissions) and aggressive commercial practices. Also, the Directive established an exhaustive list of commercial practices which are in all circumstances considered unfair (the "black list"). One of the declared purposes of the Directive was to contribute towards safeguarding of the consumers’ economic interests. The present article analyzes whether the Directive was successful in achieving this aim. The scrutiny of the wording of the Directive as well as scholar contributions allows to draw a conclusion that the Directive was not meant to deal with individual protection of the consumers. The Directive is "without prejudice" to contract law and thus it only safeguards collective consumers’ interests by applying sanctions to unfair traders.However, in practice it might be not feasible to make a complete distinction between civil law/contract law on the hand and marketing law (the Directive) on another. These two fields may often overlap, e.g. a duty to provide correct and comprehensive precontractual information may fall within the scope of both fields; conditions concerning invalidity of the contract may coincide with the prerequisites for some misleading or aggressive commercial practices etc. Notably, the Civil Code of the Republic of Lithuania also establishes special tort rules for misleading advertising. Such regulation should be considered as deficient because misleading advertising is a part of unfair commercial practices, thus the legislator should consider an option to amend the Civil Code and introduce more encompassing delictual rules dealing with all unfair commercial practices, not just misleading advertising. While considering the perspectives of the individual claim of the consumer in the court, a question also arises as to what would be the effect of the administrative decision (e.g. a sanction applied to unfair trader) in the civil case. It is most likely, that the administrative decision would only be considered as a simple evidence which means that in the civil case the consumer would generally have to prove all the relevant factual circumstances despite of the fact that the trader’s unfair commercial conduct has been already proven in the administrative case.