The unjust enrichment (“enriquecimiento injusto”) is a recent legal innovation, because until nowadays, it was neither contemplated in the Spanish Civil Code nor in the Catalan Civil Code.
The article 621-45 of the Catalan Civil Code establishes that the purchase agreement and other onerous agreements can be terminated when one of the contractual parties gets an excessive benefit or an unfair advantage with respect to the other if, at the moment of reaching the agreement, the other party was in a vulnerable situation, and the one that gets the advantage being conscious of this advantageous situation, gets profit of this situation.
In many cases, this figure can be combined with the action of damages on more than half of the market value of the service provided, as provided in article 621-46 of the Catalan Civil Code and with a long tradition in Catalan contract law.
The most important aspects of the reform are the following ones:
1.- Former article 321 of the Compilation of the Catalan Civil Law, restricted the action of termination to real estate property. This objective limitation is not contemplated any more.
2.- It is also available to execute the termination action to rental agreements and purchase carried out by consumers.
3.- The entitlement to bring the termination action belongs not only to the seller but to any injured party.
4.- Public auction does not get excluded from the possibility of the termination action.
5.- The party who has not suffered the injury may justify the imbalance of benefits with the risk inherent in random or litigious contracts.
6.- The new regulation establishes as a remedy the possibility of paying the full value of the service provided in case of injury.
The action to claim in cases of unjust enrichment, and also of the so-called ultradividium injury, prescribes after four years from the execution of the contract and, furthermore, article 621-48 of the Catalan Civil Code establishes that these actions are not waivable at the time of the execution of the contract.
In this article, we have analysed unfair advantage and its particularities. If you have any queries, you can use the contact area of our website, in order to ask to our team in the civil and commercial litigation area. We will be pleased to help you.