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The Polish consumers A (Case C-143/20) as well as G.W and E.S (Case C-213/20) acceded to, as insured persons, open-ended group endowment and life assurance contracts, so-called ‘unit-linked’, concluded between an assurance undertaking and the undertaking which is the policyholder.

By their accession, that had been offered and was managed by the undertaking which is the policyholder, those consumers agreed to pay assurance premiums, in return for services in the event of death or survival at the end of the assurance period. Those premiums were converted into units of an investment fund, then invested in financial instruments on which their value depended, that constituted the ‘underlying assets’ of the ‘unit-linked’ contracts.

Consequent on the significant loss in value of those units, those consumers brought an action seeking the recovery of all the monies that they had invested, claiming that they were not informed to the required level of detail of the characteristics and risks of those assurance products.

It is in that context that the Sąd Rejonowy dla Warszawy-Woli w Warszawie (District Court for Warszawa-Wola, Warsaw, Poland) requested that the Court of Justice clarify the scope of the pre-contractual information disclosure obligation laid down by the Life Assurance Directive in respect of a life-assurance policy holder 1 and the effects of a failure to make such a (full) disclosure.

In today’s judgment, the Court of Justice states, first of all, that the assurance relationship between the assurance undertaking and the consumer who acceded to a ‘unit-linked’ group contract falls within the concept of ‘assurance contract’, within the meaning of Directive 2002/83, even if the consumer who became a party to that group contract comes under the concept of ‘policy holder’ under that same directive. Accordingly, that consumer must receive, prior to his or her accession to the ‘unit-linked’ group contract, the information required to be communicated by that directive before signing a life-assurance contract, enabling him or her to make an informed choice of the assurance product which best meets his or her requirements. (82)