On marketing of consumer credit agreements

Case no. 85/2018 and case no. 109/2018
Judgments delivered on 9 January 2019

The Prosecution Service
vs.
Toyota Danmark A/S

and

The Prosecution Service
vs.
K.W. Bruun Import A/S

The cases concerned the issue of whether two car dealers in their advertisements for financed car deals had met the requirement in Section 14a of the Danish Marketing Practices Act in force at the time, now Section 18, that the compulsory standard information must be specified “in a prominent way”.

Based on the obvious interpretation of the wording and considering the purpose of Article 4 of the Consumer Credit Directive, the concept of “in a prominent way” must be regarded to mean that the text containing the standard information should not be too small or difficult to read compared to the rest of the text in the advertisement, and that the standard information and the representative example must stand out from the rest of the advertisement.

Based on an overall assessment of the visual expression, the Supreme Court held that the standard credit information in the advertisements could not be regarded as having been specified in a prominent way. The Supreme Court hereby gave importance to the positioning of the credit information and the font size used compared to the rest of the text in the advertisement.

Based on an overall assessment, the majority of the Supreme Court held that the fines should be fixed at an amount corresponding to double the marketing costs, and that the fine in one of the cases should be increased as this was a repeated violation.

The High Court had reached a different conclusion.