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Tuesday, December 18, 2007

The modification of the costumer protection law.

The law on protection of costumer rights was initially adopted in 1993, than modified in 2003. The latest modification took place on the 8th of December 2007.
This modification was stimulated by certain reasons and possible situations, but in my opinion it is not relevant for Moldova. In many countries, where the protection of costumer rights has an old tradition, the Government has to front the problem of the abuse of good faith principle, from the side of costumers. For example in United States, they had to do something with the situation when a person was buying a certain product, uses it for a while and than returns it back to the shop, because it didn't fit his purpose. For example, you buy a dress for a wedding, which costs a lot of money, but you know that you are going to wear it only once, after the wedding you can return it back and motivate it that you have changed your mind. This is what a lot of people were doing for some years, and the shops didn't have any mechanisms which could protect them from that. The law offers a priority to the costumer, the 14 days, in which you can return the product with almost no motivation.
But in Moldova it is different. People are not really used to bring things back, and if they do that, the companies don't really execute their duties. From a 100 of cases, only 10% probably will be satisfied. I heard a lot of situations when people were buying low quality products, or which were breaking in the first days and they couldn't get any compensations from sellers. It's a pity, but they don't respect the laws in Moldova.
Now the modification of the law I think was added with a lot of abusive clauses. They had introduced a list of products which can't be exchanged for another one, if you don't like it. This list contains almost all kinds of products.
People in Moldova were not abusing their right of 14 days, the principle of good faith. Most of them don't even know about their rights, about the Association for Protecting the Costumer's rights
The entire text of the legal act is here.

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