January 2021

Decisions of the Patras Court of First Instance on the annulment of payment orders amounting to approximately EUR 2 million

Decisions No 544 and 555/2020 of the Patras Court of First Instance were issued, on the basis of which payment orders amounting to approximately EUR 2 million were cancelled for lack of written proof. In particular, the court accepted that the credit institution had failed to prove its claims with the formality required in the relevant procedure and that the payment orders issued should therefore be annulled. The issuance of a payment order usually requires the production of an extract from the bank's relevant trading book which details the debit notes of the borrower concerned. In the cases at issue, the bank did not produce an extract from its trading book but copies of the monthly debit notes sent to the borrower each month. However, these monthly movements are not an extract from the trading books and indeed do not all form a single document so that only one validation is required at the end of their stapling. Characteristically, the court ruled: "The documents attached by the respondent in its application and produced to the Judge who issued the impugned payment order do not constitute extracts from its trading books showing the entire movement of the accounts maintained under the contract in dispute, but constitute copies of monthly movements of the account maintained, which were sent to the debtor bank for its information. These documents, however, did not constitute private documents capable of proving the defendant's claim, in accordance with the aforementioned clause 8. 3 of the loan agreement, as they did not bear the particulars of the extract from its electronically kept books, signed by an employee, lawyer or other legally authorised person, as provided for in the above contractual clause, which does not confer a corresponding full evidential value on the monthly copies of the accounts, which do not bear the aforementioned characteristics. [... ] In any event, even if it were to be assumed that the aforementioned copies of the monthly statement of account constitute documents with probative value, they were submitted in photocopies which were not certified by a lawyer, as they were stapled together, but they do not constitute a single multi-page document, but each copy of a bill constitutes a separate document, on which there is neither a certificate of authenticity or accuracy, nor a stamp nor a signature of a lawyer, and the relevant certificate of accuracy of the copy, made by the defendant's lawyer on the first page only, is not sufficient for its authentication'. This procedural problem is found in several cases of payment orders issued at the request of a particular credit institution.