Cour de cassation 1ère Chambre civile; 2022-06-15; 1re Civ., 15 juin 2022, pourvoi n° 21-10.742
Decision by national courts in the field of European Union law — ECLI:FR:CCASS:2022:C100482
Date: 2022-06-15
Subject matter: Judicial cooperation in civil matters
Origin: France

82022FR0615(52)_ENG_SUMJURE
JURE summary
JURE summary
This case examined by the Cour de Cassation (hereinafter ‘the Supreme Court’) concerned a problem of jurisdiction pertaining to a fraudulent international bank transfer.
The French company Immobilière 3F (hereinafter ‘the plaintiff’) had a bank account with the French company Société Générale (hereinafter ‘the defendant 1’). It was defrauded: someone impersonating the chief accountant of a French partner led it to make transfers to an account opened at the Portuguese company Banco Comercial Português (hereinafter ‘the defendant 2’).
The plaintiff sued both defendants in France. Defendant 2 claimed that the French courts did not have jurisdiction.
The question of jurisdiction was, in this case, governed by Article 7(2) of the Brussels I Regulation (recast) (1), which provides that ‘[a] person domiciled in a Member State may be sued in another Member State […] in matters relating to tort, delict or quasi-delict, in the courts for the place where the harmful event occurred or may occur’ (1).
The cour d’appel de Paris (hereinafter ‘the Court of Appeal’) held that the French courts had no jurisdiction, on the grounds that the damage occurred in Portugal. The Court of Appeal considered that the damage was a wrongful appropriation materialised by the crediting of a Portuguese bank account.
The plaintiff appealed to the Supreme Court. It claimed that the damage occurred when the French account was debited, because that was the moment when it was dispossessed of its funds.
The plaintiff also relied on the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (hereinafter ‘the CJEU’), which held in Case C-304/17 that ‘in a situation […] in which an investor brings, on the basis of the prospectus relating to a certificate in which he or she invested, a tort action against the bank which issued that certificate, the courts of that investor’s domicile, as the courts for the place where the harmful event occurred within the meaning of that provision, have jurisdiction to hear and determine that action, where the damage the investor claims to have suffered consists in financial loss which occurred directly in that investor’s bank account with a bank established within the jurisdiction of those courts and the other specific circumstances of that situation also contribute to attributing jurisdiction to those courts’ (2).
The Supreme Court agreed that the damage occurred in France, and noted that the other specific circumstances of the situation were decisive. That meant that the French courts had jurisdiction only if the other specific circumstances of the case contributed to attributing jurisdiction to them; conversely, the Court of Appeal could rule that the French courts had no jurisdiction only if the other specific circumstances of the case contributed to attributing jurisdiction to other courts; as the Court of Appeal did not examine if that was indeed the case, its ruling had no legal basis.
The Supreme Court set aside the judgment of the Court of Appeal and referred the case back before this court.
(1) Regulation (EU) No 1215/2012 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 12 December 2012 on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters (recast).
(2) Judgment of the Court of Justice of 12 September 2018, Helga Löber v Barclays Bank PLC, C-304/17, ECLI:EU:C:2018:701, paragraph 37.