I flagged earlier that regardless of the outcome for the Unamar case itself, an important consideration would be what the Court’s eventual answer will teach us about the Rome I Regulation on the applicable law for contracts (as opposed to its Treaty predecessor, the Rome Convention, which applies to the case at issue). Wahl AG’s Opinion was published this morning (as often, the English version was not yet available at the time of writing). It focuses almost entirely on the Rome Convention – for which from a legal point of view it cannot be faulted.
Belgium’s stronger protection of the agent, long held by Belgian law to be of overriding mandatory rules calibre, gold plates the regime of the Commercial Agents Directive, Directive 86/653. In Unamar, parties have agreed on Bulgarian law being applicable law (as well as incidentally on the case having to go to arbitration in Bulgaria first, attempting to circumvent Belgian law which proscribes the use of arbitration for disputes such as those at issue; the AG notes that this issue was not actually part of the questions referred by the Hof van Cassatie, hence he does not entertain it). The question therefore arises as to whether Belgian law, the lex fori, can justifiably trump Bulgarian law of which no suggestion is being made that it does not meet the minimum standard of the precited Directive.
In view of the minimum harmonisation character of the commercial agents Directive, and of there being no indication that such application leads to infringement of primary EU law, the AG suggests that Belgium courts are justified to qualify the Belgian gold-plating as being of overriding mandatory character.
As I noted when I flagged the reference, in my view the answer would have to be different under the Rome I Regulation. In the absence of a reference to gold plating in Article 9, and (arguably) its presence in Article 3, effect utile requires that the allowance for national rules of overriding mandatory nature, does not cover gold plating. However in the Rome Convention which is applicable to the case referred, EU law as mandatory law does not figure at all, and the room for overriding rules is much wider than it is in the Rome Regulation.
One will have to wait for the ECJ’s judgment to assess whether the Court itself will reveal anything on its position vis-a-vis the Regulation.
Geert.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
