Luxembourg, 14/09/2004 (Agence Europe) - The European Court of Justice has instructed the Munich Landgericht on how to decide when telephone tariffs calculated on a per-minute basis should be rounded to the nearest eurocent by a German mobile telephone operator, O2.
The Court commented that the transition to the euro should be neutral and that a rounding practice should therefore not affect contractual obligations entered into by consumers and it should not have a real impact on the price actually to be paid, and the Court of Justice found that it was for the national court to ascertain whether this was the case in the dispute before it.
This case concerns the conversion in 2001 by telephone operator O2 of per-minute prices. O2 converted its tariffs from German marks into euros and rounded them to the nearest eurocent. Verbraucher-Zentrale, a consumer association, took the view that this rounding resulted in an increase in O2's prices and therefore constituted improper application of EU Regulation 1103-97 on the introduction of the euro, whereby prices to be 'paid or accounted for' must be rounded up or down to the nearest eurocent.
Verbraucher-Zentrale maintained that the per-minute price could not be rounded to the euro under the 1997 regulation, since that price was only an intermediate amount, not an amount to be paid or accounted for.
The German court stayed 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 therefore had to be rounded or whether only the final amount for which the customer was actually invoiced could constitute such an amount.
The Court noted that the concept of intermediate monetary amounts was not covered by the 1997 regulation, but it is not permissible in every case. 'The general principle of continuity of contracts and the objective that the transition to the euro should be neutral mean that a rounding practice should not affect contractual obligations entered into by economic agents, including consumers, and that it should not have a real impact on the price actually to be paid.' The Court therefore found that it was for the Munich Landesgericht to rule on O2's tariffs.