A READER from Mayenne, Ann Wadge, stood up for her rights against insurance firm Groupama on two occasions when it refused to honour insurance claims in full.
The first was when dogs were chasing, injuring and killing sheep covered under her household insurance.
Groupama paid for vets’ fees and loss of the animals, but not for installing protective wire fencing and paying for extra hay for a period when it was not safe to allow the sheep out to graze. She said: “It was all connected. If it hadn’t been for the dogs chasing the sheep, I wouldn’t have had to pay for the hay or the wire.”
It took several phone calls and letters, but, in the end, it paid in full, about €300. The letters were ordinary ones and Mrs Wadge got a French friend to check them. “I just kept insisting and saying ‘This is all caused by the same thing and I think you should pay up’ and all of a sudden they did.”
The second challenge related to legal protection insurance. Mrs Wadge was involved in a neighbour dispute over boundaries; an avocat (lawyer) she employed recommended a report be done by a surveyor colleague, which cost €700.
The insurers agreed on the phone to reimburse this, she said, but when she claimed, the firm said surveyor’s fees were not covered.
She said: “I spoke to them on the phone twice and sent a letter and in the end they said, “All right then, we’ll pay”. People are intimidated by anyone at all official. Especially if their French is not very good, the British will often back down and not take it any further.”
NINETY-YEAR-OLD Harry Stone, from Montpellier, took his internet and telephone company, Free, to court after it refused to pay enough compensation for him being cut off for three months.
A technical fault caused him to be cut off after he switched from France Télécom to Free.
“I had several visits from Free, who said, ‘We can’t open that box because it’s France Télécom’s’. In the end they came with a FT technician and in 20 minutes it was done. I had tried to take it up with France Télécom, but they said I wasn’t their customer.”
Mr Stone said he demanded compensation, using emails and recorded delivery post. They made an offer, but it was too small. “I am very old and my wife is ill and we need to be able to telephone. I said, ‘It’s not acceptable, I’ll take you to court’.”
He applied to the local tribunal d'instance (lower court), which he was able to do without a lawyer, by visiting the greffe (court office) so court action cost nothing.
“Fortunately I have good French, because there were a lot of papers to fill in. I had to be able to prove my case, but Free just said it was France Télécom’s fault. I said I did not have a contract with them.”
Free was ordered to pay him €1,000 and France Télécom had to pay Free about e400, he said. The firms also faced expenses for a Paris lawyer it used.
“They would have been better off making me a better offer. There was another Briton in court with a suit against another provider and they settled out of court straight away for more than I got. He was just lucky, I think.”
Mr Stone’s advice is: “Do not give in and in the end they will collapse. Just be sure you are in the right and are genuinely suffering unduly from some stupidity.”
Now he said he is is pursuing a new legal battle over his right to install a lift in his building, at his own expense, to continue to gain access to the upper-floor flat where he has lived for 25 years.
His mairie refused, on the grounds it is in a conservation area (even though the lift would invisible from the street). However, a lawyer friend pointed out new legislation that gives priority rights to elderly or disabled people trying to stay in their homes.
He went to the administrative court, using an avocat, which is obligatory in this case, and the court found against the mairie and ordered them to pay his legal fees. They were found to have overstepped their rights, he said.
Mr Stone, however, has still not been given a document allowing the installation, which he needs to apply for a departmental council grant, so he is contemplating a return to court.
“I’m not getting any younger, but what else can I do? I could just put the blasted thing up, but then I would lose €7,000 subsidy. I think they are waiting for me to die, but my dad died at 108 and I’m going to beat him.”
DUDLEY Wood, from Tarn-et-Garonne, mounted a successful challenge against Nissan France with help from national consumer group UFC-Que Choisir.
His car broke down because its four-wheel-drive box was found to have disintegrated after 69,000km. His local dealer said there may be a case for Nissan paying towards the €3,121 cost of repair. However the national office refused on a technicality: he had not rotated the tyres every 7,500km, as mentioned in the manual.
Mr Wood said he wrote to the national customer services department, explaining the problem, but was refused. The same happened when he wrote to the managing director.
He wrote saying he would apply to UFC-Que Choisir. “A friend had recommended talking to them as he had had a dispute with a shop which they resolved satisfactorily for him.”
Mr Wood paid €29 for an annual subscription to the association, then their advice and help was free.
He visited them several times in his nearest large town and was seen by an expert in problems relating to cars, assisted by an interpreter. He took a report from the garage and photos of the parts.
“Their immediate reaction was that this could not have been caused by me or by a problem with tyre replacements, and they wrote to Nissan France on my behalf.”
At first they received a refusal, but they persisted with another letter, and when it was ignored, a third one.
“They wrote in very strong language, indicating we would be going to court if we did not receive compensation of at least 70 per cent of the original invoice for the repair within a few days. I then received a phone call from the local Nissan agent asking me to go in to receive a cheque for €2,185 authorised by Nissan France. I could still have tried taking them to court for the full amount, but UFC-Que Choisir said there was no guarantee I would win.
“I cannot praise UFC Que Choisir enough for the support and assistance which they gave me in getting at least some compensation.”
ROBERT King, from the Languedoc-Roussillon, said he made a successful challenge after an unexpected charge of €61 was docked from a €250 Spanish euro cheque he paid into his bank.
He was surprised when he checked his account to see only e189 had been credited.
“I immediately spoke to my adviser at the bank, who speaks English, querying the deduction. She said they did not publish all their charges because they were too numerous to mention, but she said she would take up my complaint with the manager. I said I would at least have expected the cheque to go through at face value and then for charges to be shown separately, otherwise it looks like deception or even fraud.”
The bank then agreed to refund the charge, by taking it off an annual one for his credit card. “It seems it wasn’t a mistake; it appears it’s what they normally do with foreign euro cheques, but I think the manager was worried about what I had said. It pays to query their methods and charges.”
Useful contacts
For consumer rights bodies, see www.conso.net, which lists them by specialities (finances, health etc).
Find your local branch of UFC-Que Choisir, one of the most active, at www.quechoisir.org/un-litige
There is also a network of local trading standards bodies, called DDCCRFs to which complaints can be made, and certain sectors, such as telecoms (www.mediateur-telecom.fr) and energy (www.energie-mediateur.fr), have their own national mediators.
For free legal advice you can visit a local maison de justice et du droit (look in the phone directory).
