Thousands of foreign diesel buyers who have assigned their claims against VW to the online service provider Myright can hope for compensation again. Unlike before the courts in Braunschweig judged Federal Court of Justice (BGH) on Monday in the model case of a Swiss customer that Myright meets all the requirements to ultimately collect the claims through class action lawsuits.
The German company Financialright, which is behind Myright, does not have to prove any special expertise in Swiss law. This means that the content of the individual claims can now be checked.
Myright works against a commission in the event of success and advertises that even customers without legal protection insurance do not bear any cost risk. According to VW, several class action lawsuits are pending in German courts for a total of around 36,000 clients. These include two lawsuits for more than 2,000 Swiss and around 6,000 Slovenian customers.
Stefan Zimmermann from Myright has already spoken of a “milestone for consumer protection”. For the Switzerland and Slovenia, the business model has in any case been confirmed to such an extent that “we can finally discuss with VW how much compensation the customer is actually entitled to.” As far as German customers are concerned, everything now depends on the exact wording of the judgment.
VW, on the other hand, announced that in the specific case they were expecting a “dismissal of the lawsuit at a later date”. Because according to the Swiss law applicable to the case, the asserted claims would not exist. So far, no Swiss court has filed a claim for damages Volkswagen granted.
Residual compensation may be due to those affected who have not sued for compensation in good time. According to the first BGH rulings, however, the prerequisites for this are only given for new cars, not for cars bought used. The model case concerned a car imported from another EU country with zero kilometers on the speedometer. Such cars are often cheaper because they were not produced for the German market.
Here the highest civil judges decided that residual damages can be considered. However, the prerequisite is that neither the dealer in Germany nor the intermediary abroad would have bought the car from VW at their own expense and risk, regardless of the order. The Stuttgart Higher Regional Court had not examined this in the specific case. This must now be made up for.
The class action lawsuits are not to be confused with the already concluded model declaratory action lawsuit brought against Volkswagen by consumer advice centers. This procedure had ended with a settlement from which a good 245,000 diesel owners benefited. Tens of thousands of individual plaintiffs also received damages from VW. They had all bought a diesel with the scandalous EA189 engine, which had been manipulated in such a way that emission limits were only met in official tests.