TELECOMMUNICATIONS: COURT OF JUSTICE FINDS AGAINST GERMAN OPERATOR O2 ON CONVERTING MARKS INTO EUROS.

A 1997 Council regulation provides that conversion rates, adopted as one Euro expressed in terms of each of the national currencies of the Euro-zone, are to be adopted with six significant figures and cannot be rounded or truncated when making conversions. However, monetary amounts to be paid or accounted for, when a rounding takes place after a conversion into the Euro unit are to be rounded up or down to the nearest cent. In 2001, during the so-called transitional period, O2, which operates a mobile telephone network in Germany, converted its price-per-minute tariffs from German marks into Euros and rounded them to the nearest cent. Verbraucher-Zentrale, a consumer association competent to take legal action in respect of breaches of consumer protection laws, took the view that this rounding practice resulted in an increase in O2's prices. It maintained that the per-minute price could not be rounded in such a way under the 1997 regulation, since that price was only an intermediate amount, not an amount to be paid or accounted for. The Landgericht Munchen I, before which Verbraucher-Zentrale brought an action, stayed the proceedings and asked the Court of Justice whether such a tariff constituted an amount to be paid or accounted for within the meaning of the Council regulation and whether it thus had to be rounded or whether only the final amount for which the customer was actually invoiced could constitute such an amount. If the answer was negative, the Landgericht wished to know whether the Council regulation precluded amounts other than those which must be paid or accounted for from being rounded to the nearest cent.

The Court noted first that the concept of "monetary amounts to be paid or accounted for" under the 1997 regulation clearly includes amounts which give rise to payment on the consumer's part, namely all monetary debts and amounts entered in accounting documents or statements. In order to determine whether that concept also encompasses monetary amounts, such as the per-minute prices applied by O2, which serve as a basis for calculating the price to be paid by the consumer, the Court referred to the objectives of the regulation, chief of which was the objective that the transition to the Euro should be neutral, which was intended to ensure that the transition to the Euro should take place without affecting obligations already entered into by citizens and firms.

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