Control of Price Related Terms in Standard Form Contracts in Slovenia

In Slovenian Law of standard contracts terms in B2C contracts, the terms relating to the main subject matter of the contract or the adequacy of the price and remuneration (“core terms”) are exempt from judicial fairness assessment insofar as they are in plain intelligible language. In a number of pending cases relating to credit contracts in Swiss Francs, the fairness assessment of the foreign currency clauses depends on the question whether these clauses are in plain intelligible language. In a recent case the Supreme Court assessed the fairness of a term which, although it influenced the price, did not belong to “core terms”. In another case, the Court assessed the fairness of the price calculation mechanism. The Slovenian Obligations Code contains a possibility to avoid the contract due to laesio enormis—a particular form of mistake. However, in most cases, the courts reject such claims as they consider the mistake of a party with regard to the price/value to be inexcusable. A contract can be also found usurious and thus, null and void, where, in addition to significant imbalance, a party one party has knowingly exploited a difficult situation of the other party the result of which was an imbalanced contract.