In a ruling issued on April 28th, 2022, the 30th Civil Division of Stuttgart Regional Court dismissed another lawsuit brought by a debt collection agency in connection with the trucks cartel. This comes after the largest lawsuit brought in Germany by a debt collection agency had already failed before Munich I Regional Court in January 2020 due to violations of the Out-of-Court Legal Services Act.
In the present case, alleged claims from some 350 companies had been assigned to the plaintiff Themis Schaden GmbH – a subsidiary of Europäische Ladungs-Verbunds Internationaler Spediteure AG (E.L.V.I.S. AG) – which was represented in court by Arnecke Sibeth Dabelstein. These companies had purchased between one and 1,600 trucks from manufacturers Daimler, MAN, DAF, Iveco, Volvo, Renault and Scania in Germany and seven other European countries. Themis Schaden GmbH filed a class action suit seeking roughly EUR 96 million in damages from Daimler.
In its ruling, Stuttgart Regional Court followed Daimler's line of argument that the plaintiff violated the Out-of-Court Legal Services Act on several counts, rendering the assignment of the damages claims invalid.
The court held that the plaintiff's assignment model exceeded the bounds of its debt collection licence. It also ruled that the assignment model resulted in an irresolvable conflict of interests for the plaintiff.
The 53rd Civil Division of Stuttgart Regional Court already dismissed a class action lawsuit filed against Daimler by debt collection agency AdvoFin Deutschland GmbH a few weeks ago.
The following Gleiss Lutz team advised on the matter: Dr. Ulrich Denzel (partner, Competition/Antitrust, Stuttgart), Dr. Stefan Rützel (partner, Frankfurt, both lead), Dr. Lukas Schultze-Moderow (partner, Hamburg), Dr. Bernd Zimmermann (counsel, Berlin), Dr. René Kremer (counsel, Stuttgart), Dr. Simon Wagner (counsel, Stuttgart, all Litigation), Dr. Carsten Klöppner (counsel), Dr. Ines Bodenstein (counsel), Moritz Krause, Ramona Wehrle (all Competition/Antitrust, all Stuttgart), Katja Meyer, Josefin Saeger-Dreblow (both Litigation, Berlin).
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