The law establishes that for violation of consumer rights, the seller is obliged to bear responsibility in the form of payment of a penalty and compensation for all losses incurred by him. What are the differences between these financial sanctions and for what actions of the seller they can be recovered?
The legal concept of "losses" is given in the Civil Code of the Russian Federation. These are all expenses that the buyer must incur or have already incurred due to the fact that the seller violated his rights, for example, by selling goods with defects, violating the terms of delivery of the goods or the terms of satisfying the buyer's claims, etc.
So, losses include, for example, money paid under a car rental agreement, which the buyer was forced to conclude in connection with the warranty repair of his car. Or, for example, the cost of repairing the neighbors' apartment, which was paid by the buyer due to the fact that poor-quality pipes to the water heater burst. Examples of consumer losses can be cited as many as you like, including the cost of repairing a poor-quality item.
The seller is obliged to satisfy the claim for reimbursement of the buyer's expenses voluntarily, otherwise the court will also recover from him a fine in the amount of 1/2 of the awarded damages.
A penalty is the amount of money that the seller pays to the buyer in the event of a delay in fulfilling his obligations. It is collected in such cases:
- for violation of the term of warranty repair of goods;
- for violation of the three-day period for the free provision of replacement goods to the buyer for the period of repair;
- for violation of the deadline for replacing goods of inadequate quality with a new one;
- for violation of the ten-day period for a commensurate reduction in the purchase price, reimbursement to the buyer of repair costs and other losses associated with defects in the goods;
- for violation of the deadline for the transfer of prepaid goods to the consumer.
The amount of the penalty is established by the Law "On Protection of Consumer Rights" - it is 1% of the price of the goods for each day of delay. The only exception is a violation of the deadline for the transfer of the prepaid goods - here the penalty is set at 0.5% of the advance payment for each day of stitching and the amount of the penalty as a whole cannot exceed the amount of the advance payment made. The penalty shall be collected for each violation committed by the seller separately.
