Decision of the Regional Court in Gdańsk 9th Commercial Division of 30th September 2014
IX GC 710/12

1. Deciding on the admissibility of group proceedings is the first stage of the proceedings and constitutes the form of a unique prejudication, unrelated to the content-related assessment of the legitimacy of the claims pursued in the statement of claims.
2. The Act on Pursuing Claims in Group Proceedings does not contain a definition of a consumer protection case or a definition of a consumer. Therefore, invoking Article 22¹ of the Civil Code, it is fitting to indicate that a consumer is considered to be a natural person performing an act in law not directly related to their economic or professional activity.
3. The role of the group representative filing a statement of claims in a group proceedings consists in providing a convincing substantiation that pursued claims of all group members, grounded on many legal bases, are based on the same or equal factual basis.
4. If each of the members of the group identifies the damage inflicted thereupon by the defendants with the loss of funds paid to the company in performance of the agreements concluded therewith and predicted profits, then from this point of view, the type of agreements and conditions of their conclusion become a substantial, differentiating circumstance of the factual status.
5. The legislator rendered the notion of a “subgroup” more precise – it covers at least 2 persons whose claims, due to varied circumstances concerning individual members of the group, may not be standardised in the frames of a group. A subgroup is comprised of a set of parties whose claims, due to the occurring diversification (rendering standardisation within the group impossible), are standardised by forming a separate set of parties (called a subgroup).
6. The standardisation of claims in the frames of a subgroup consisting solely on the fact that group members’ claims are being adjusted to the value of the lowest of them, without indication of other than the value of the damage criteria for claims standardisation, in the face of many differentiating factual circumstances existing in the case, seems insufficient.