Where self employed agents had been taken on to market the respondent’s services, and those agencies were terminated, such activities were those of commercial agents within the Directive, and they were entitled to compensation. Whether he was a secondary agent or not was a question foreign to English law, and not to be gleaned other than through the Regulations and the facts. If the agents are not secondary, they are within the Regulations. Here the respondent would derive a long term benefit from their activities, and they were not secondary.
Morison J reviewed the genesis of the Directive and made reference to Law Commission Report No 84, 1977 which said: ‘The provisions of the Directive were clearly based upon the German Commercial Code and related to a special category of agent who acted for his principal ‘who must be his standing client’. In German law the commercial agent is ‘identifiable as a member of a particular social group with special social and economic needs’. Such an agent was a quasi employee requiring protection from exploitation’.
Morison J
Times 27-Jun-2000, Gazette 29-Jun-2000, [2000] EuLR 708, [2000] CLC 1397
Commercial Agents (Council Directive) Regulations 1993 No 3053
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Ingmar GB Ltd v Eaton Leonard Inc QBD 31-Jul-2001
The applicants sought damages as commercial agents following the termination of their exclusive agency for the sale of the respondents goods in the UK. The defendants claimed the contract was governed exclusively by Californian law. The European . .
Cited – Rossetti Marketing Ltd v Diamond Sofa Company Ltd and Another QBD 3-Oct-2011
The claimants sought compensation under the 1993 Rules. The defendants denied that the claimants were agents within the rules, since they also acted as agents for other furniture makers.
Held: Whether a party is a commercial agent within the . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Agency, Commercial
Updated: 26 January 2022; Ref: scu.89699
