publication
2026-04-30 06:00
The April “credit series” continues at the Court of Justice of the European Union. Another verdict will be handed down on April 30. The case stems from a particularly consequential addition to a mortgage contract.
The accumulation of decisions important for borrowers is coming to an end. In April, the Court of Justice of the European Union expressed its opinion in as many as 5 cases originating in disputes between Polish borrowers and banks.
On April 16, 2026, judgments were issued relating to 3 questions about “franc” lawsuits and the problem of limitation of claims for return of capital. On the same day, the opinion of the Advocate General of the CJEU on the reimbursement of insurance costs after the loan agreement was deemed non-binding was published. On April 23, 2026, the Tribunal looked at the issue of charging interest on the credited costs of fees and commissions in consumer loans.
On April 30, a slightly smaller case remains on the agenda because it concerns a relatively small group of borrowers who have annexed loan agreements. However, Swiss francs appear again in the background.
An extremely unlucky change
The dispute, which is under the microscope of the CJEU, began with the conclusion of a loan agreement in 2007. A client of the then BGŻ bank entered into a loan for the construction of a house in PLN. The contract amount was PLN 415,000. PLN, and the interest rate was a derivative of the margin and the WIBOR 3M index.
In March 2008, the client decided convert the liability into Swiss francs. An annex was concluded, and after conversion, the loan amount was PLN 209,000. CHF. It is worth noting that the exchange rate of the Helvetian currency was close to its historical minimum at that time.
In 2022, the consumer filed a lawsuit in which she indicated: unfair nature of the so-called conversion clause. The defendant was BNP Paribas Bank, the legal successor of BGŻ. According to the plaintiff, signing the annex led to such a significant change in the conditions that in the legal sense there was a novation (renewal) of the obligation. And since the annex creating this new obligation is defective due to the abusive clauses it contains, the consequence must be invalidity of the loan agreement from 2007 year in full.
What did the Polish court ask?
The District Court in Warsaw decided to refer a question to the CJEU, which focuses on the effects of the invalidity of an annex to a loan agreement containing prohibited clauses. One option may be a “return to the past”, i.e. recognizing the annex as non-binding a Swiss franc loan becomes a loan in Polish zloty again. The second option is declaring the entire agreement, as amended, non-binding.
The court's question was as follows: “whether Article 6(1) and Article 7(1) of Council Directive 93/13/EEC of 5 April 1993 on unfair terms in consumer contracts, as well as the principles of effectiveness and proportionality, should be interpreted as precluding the judicial interpretation of national provisions, according to which, where it is considered that in the event of the inclusion of prohibited contract terms in an annex to a contract, leading to the invalidity of this annex, this annex shall be deemed never to have been concluded, and the agreement shall be deemed to be in force from the beginning in an unchanged version.
The problem is not only technical
Contrary to appearances, the case marked C-246/25 touches on an issue that goes deeper than technicalities. From the point of view of one of the objectives of the Consumer Directive, which is to deter entrepreneurs from trying to use unfair terms in contracts, it would be more severe to consider the entire contract as non-binding. At the same time, the second possible solution can be justified equally convincingly – the invalidation of the annex does not make it impossible to perform the contract in its original form.
