Victims who bought Kimono from bogus sellers settled with connected creditors

“Aizenen Yamakyu”, Kimono’s distributor, sold expensive Kimonos aggressively to a lot of consumers; they have explanatory that they did not have any obligation of payment, if they would act as monitors of Kimono.

This practice is calld as “Monitor Syo-ho (sales practice)”, currently regulated by the Specific Commercial Trading Act as a sales inducing work-in-home. The National Consumer Affairs Centre issued the reserch report regarding the responsibility of creditors connected with the rogue traders.

But, the distributor went bankrupt in 2000; the company could not perform his obligation to the creditors, therefore, purchasers had to continue their payment to the creditors due to their contracts.

The 234 purchasers, who were located in Hokkaido, filed lawsuits to the 7 credit companies, claiming that they did not have any obligation of total amount of 560,000,000 yen to the creditors. Same lawsuits were filed in nationwide.

 On 2nd March 2009, the plaintiffs settled with creditors connected to distributor.

On settlement agreements in the Sapporo District Court, the creditors waived most of their claims instead of paying a portion of claims, 76,000,000 yen.

Does a securities brokers have duty to prevent to expand trading loss of a suctomer?

Tokyo District Court approved damages claim of a customer who traded securities via a defendant securities trading company. An article of the Yomiuri Shimbun reported it on February 23, 2009.

The defendant company made the plaintiff continue to hold securities after their price dropped intensely. The court said that the defendant had a duty to prevent the trading loss to expand, therefore he should pay damages equivalent to the dropped value.