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| Abstract | ||||||||||||||||||
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| A French seller and a German buyer entered into a contract for the sale of textiles. The buyer alleged non-conformity of the goods yet failed to specify precisely the lack of conformity and refused to pay the purchase price. The seller claimed payment of the purchase price with interest.
The court held that the contract was governed by CISG, as the German private international law rules led to the application of the law of France, a contracting State (Art. 1(1)(b) CISG). The court held that the buyer had to pay the purchase price (Art. 53 CISG), and further that interest was payable according to Art. 78 CISG from the date that the buyer had to pay the price. As CISG does not expressly specify the rate of interest payable, the court referred to German private international law rules to ascertain the applicable law for the determination of the interest rate. The court left open whether the interest rate was the statutory rate in France (place of business of the seller/creditor) or that in Germany (place of residence of the buyer/debtor) as the rates of interest in both countries were the same (5%). |