An amendment to the Collective Actions Act (ZKolT-A) has been adopted and will enter into force on 26 January 2024. The amendment fully implements Directive 2020/1828/EU on representative actions for the protection of the collective interests of consumers in the Slovenian legal order. The most important novelties introduced by the amendment to the ZKolT-A will be presented below.
The amendment introduces a definition of third-party funding of collective actions, which means that the third party provides the claimant with funding for part or all of the costs of the proceedings in return for an agreed fee in the event of success with the claim, usually set as a percentage of the amount to be awarded by the court or as a percentage of the amount agreed in a settlement reached in the proceedings. The amendment allows a party to request, when submitting the source of the funding to the competent authority in the case of third-party funding of a collective action, that the part of the funding agreement containing business secrets be covered. It is expressly provided that it is not permissible for a third-party funder of a collective action to have a decisive influence on the procedural decisions of the claimant insofar as these are detrimental to the collective interests of the consumers who are the subject of the representative action concerned by the claimant's action. The conditions to be met for the admissibility of third-party funding are also expanded, specifically defining the "reasonable amount of the agreed fee”. In relation to third-party funding, the remuneration of the lawyer is also newly defined, allowing the lawyer to agree to a remuneration higher than the lawyer's tariff or to receive as a fee a share of up to 15% of the amount to be awarded by the court, provided that such an agreement is reasonable (the criteria are laid down by the Act).
The State Attorney's Office of the Republic of Slovenia is newly designated as the person entitled to bring a collective action or to request approval of a collective settlement, instead of the senior State Attorney. A collective action cannot be brought by the State Attorney's Office only in cases where the Republic of Slovenia is the opposing party to the action. In addition, it is newly stipulated that private legal persons, as the persons entitled to bring collective actions, must publish on their websites information on their sources of funding, their organisational and administrative structure, their membership structure, their founding purpose, and their activities.
An important amendment is the extension of the persons entitled to bring collective actions. Thus, a person representing the interests of consumers in another EU Member State who is entered on the list of persons entitled to bring consumer collective actions in that Member State is also an eligible person, provided that its founding purpose justifies, in a particular case, the bringing of a collective action or an application for the approval of a collective settlement. A new Chapter of the ZKolT-A regulates the persons entitled to bring consumer collective actions in another Member State, registration on and removal from the list, and the national contact point, whose tasks are carried out by the ministry responsible for consumer protection (the Ministry of Economy, Tourism and Sport). The amendment also provides that if, in the course of proceedings, the court finds that a person entitled to bring consumer collective actions in another Member State has been removed from the list of persons entitled to bring consumer collective actions in that Member State, it shall, on the application of a member of the group or of another person entitled, issue an order replacing the claimant with another person entitled to bring consumer collective actions, provided that the latter is willing to intervene in the proceedings.
The Act provides that if a collective action or a motion for approval of a collective settlement is brought by a private-law legal person, the court shall examine whether it is representative. The amended Act redefines the criterion by which the court determines the representativeness of an eligible person.
It is also newly provided that the limitation period for the protection of a claim arising out of the legal relations of persons based on the same cause of action as the subject matter of the injunctive collective action does not run during the pendency of the injunctive collective action.
In addition, once the amendment enters into force, the claimant will have to ensure that information on the status of the collective action or the application for approval of a collective settlement and the outcome of the collective action or the collective settlement is published on the claimant's website.
