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Misleading and Comparative Advertising Directive, link Consumer Rights Directive, link

La Precettività Del Valore Del Risparmio Nella Tutela Del Risparmiatore O «Consumatore Di Servizi Finanziari» Un Focus Sul Riparto Fra Consob E Agcm In Materia Di Pratiche Commerciali Sleali.

In the context of a new interpretation of the traditional values of savings and loans, as an effect of EU law and of the recent crisis of global economy, the inner complexity of financial service markets and the peculiar level of risk which characterises its exchanges, dramatically pointed out by the crisis itself, have led to raise questions about savers’ and non-professional investors’ protection, and about the possibility to extend to them the general discipline on consumers’ protection. This last discipline, either European and national, tends at the same time to maximum harmonisation and, on the opposite, to enhance peculiarities of the subjects acting on single reference markets regulated by specific disciplines, so that consumer general concept tends to fragment in many different sectoral categories, declining protection requirements according to different contexts in which stakeholders act or even to single acts they perform. It doesn’t seem possible to deny the similarity between the saver/non-professional investor concept and the consumer one, as they both share a structural «weakness» and a disadvantage in information which justifies particular forms of protection; it would be more difficult, instead, to correctly apply the principle of speciality to understand how the specific discipline of «financial services consumer», which sets fairness, transparency and information duties and entrusts Consob Authority with supervision on them, can coordinate with the general EU and national legislation on consumers’ protection against unfair commercial practices; in the face of not unequivocal answers given by Courts, many questions remain unanswered, given the difficulty of finding solutions indistinctly applicable for every specific case.