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By Giorgos Kazoleas, LL.M., Lawyer, Managing Partner at Legal Experts Cyprus The purchase or construction of a new residence is one of the most significant financial and personal decisions a consumer can make. Residential construction contracts or agreements for the sale of property under construction are a crucial and defining element of the entire process, as certain terms they may contain can be detrimental to the buyer. One of the most critical aspects is the contractual delivery time of the project and the provision for delay, through the so-called delivery delay clause. The Delivery Delay Clause: Its Role and Legal Nature The delivery delay clause (also known as a penalty clause in the event of default) is a term usually included in the contract that specifies a predetermined compensation amount that the contractor or seller must pay to the buyer for every day, week, or month of delay beyond the agreed delivery date. The purpose of the clause is twofold: -Compensatory: ...

Judgment of the Court of Justice in Case C-368/24 /Commission v Greece (Enforcement of the judgment on the Zakynthos landfill). Failure of a Member State to fulfil its obligations: Greece is ordered to pay financial penalties for failing to comply with a 2014 judgment of the Court of Justice. Greece is ordered to pay the European Commission a periodic penalty payment of €12 500 for each day of delay until the 2014 judgment has been complied with and a lump sum of €5 500 000 In the 2014 Commission v Greece judgment, [1] the Court held that Greece had failed to fulfil its obligations under two directives on waste. [2] [3]  Greece had not put an end to the use of a landfill in the Zakynthos National Maritime Park, the habitat of the ‘Caretta caretta’ sea turtle, even though the landfill was overfull and its malfunction represented a danger to health and the environment. With regard to the present case, an exchange of correspondence took place between the European Commission and Greece...

In Chamber’s judgment in the case of Hora v. the United Kingdom (application no. 1048/20) the European Court of Human Rights held, unanimously, that there had been no violation of Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 (right to free elections) to the European Convention on Human Rights. The case concerned prisoner voting in the United Kingdom. The applicant’s case was the first to come before the Court concerning an election which had taken place following the steps taken by the United Kingdom to enforce the Court’s judgment in the case of Hirst v. the United Kingdom (no. 2) (application no. 74525/01). In the light of the developments since Hirst, the Court examined the manner in which the legislation in question had been applied to the specific applicant, in his particular circumstances. Considering the seriousness of his offending, his conduct, the risk he was found to pose to the public and the resulting imposition of a harsh sentence of indeterminate detention, the Court found that the r...

Judgment of the Court of Justice in Case C-38/24: Discrimination at work: The rights of persons with disabilities to protection against indirect discrimination extend to parents of children with disabilities. Employment and working conditions should be adapted to enable those parents to care for their child without the risk of being subject to indirect discrimination. A station operator repeatedly asked her employer to appoint her to a position with fixed working hours. Her request was based on the need to care for her son, who has extensive and comprehensive needs arising from disability. Her employer provided her with some accommodations on a provisional basis. However, the employer refused to make those accommodations permanent. The station operator contested that refusal before the Italian courts and the case reached the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation. That court referred questions to the Court of Justice because it had doubts as to the interpretation of EU law with regard to p...

International Conference "Revisiting the protection of minority shareholders in company law: EU, comparative and national perspectives", Wednesday 15 October 2025, Department of Law, University of Cyprus. This conference is funded by the A. G. Leventis Foundation as part of the Research Project "Protection of minority shareholders in Cyprus company law and capital markets law: an EU and comparative analysis" (ProMiSh). The Host Organization is the University of Cyprus. The Principal Investigator of this Research Project and the coordinator of this conference is Thomas Papadopoulos, Associate Professor of Business Law at the Department of Law of the University of Cyprus. Dr. Georgios Zouridakis, PhD (Essex), is the Research Fellow of this Research Project. Protection of minority shareholders is a core subject of company law, but there is no recent international conference examining various EU, comparative and national perspectives on this area.  This confer...

Digital Services Act: The General Court annuls the Commission’s decisions setting the supervisory fee applicable to Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. However, the effects of the annulled decisions are provisionally maintained. (Judgments of the General Court in Case T-55/24: Meta Platforms Ireland v Commission and T-58/24  TikTok Technology v Commission). The Digital Services Act (‘the DSA’) [1] entrusts the European Commission with supervisory tasks in relation to providers of certain services, designated as very large platforms or very large online search engines since they exceed a significant minimum threshold of users in the European Union.  In order to cover the costs necessary for that purpose and to perform those tasks, the Commission collects, from those providers, an annual fee which is determined on the basis of the number of average monthly users of each service concerned. [2]  On 2 March 2023, the Commission adopted a delegated regulation supplementing the DSA ...

Judgment of the General Court in Case T-553/23 | Latombe v Commission: Data Protection: the General Court dismisses an action for annulment of the new framework for the transfer of personal data between the European Union and the United States. In so doing, it confirms that, on the date of adoption of the contested decision, the United States of America ensured an adequate level of protection for personal data transferred from the European Union to organisations in that country. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union [1] and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) [2] enshrine the right of every person to the protection of his or her personal data. On the basis of those legal instruments, and to avoid compromising the level of protection conferred within the European Union, EU secondary legislation [3] lays down the rules applicable to international transfers of personal data.  In accordance with those rules, if the European Commission considers ...

Judgment of the Court of Justice (1.8.2025) in Case C-665/23: Payment services: the payment card user is deprived of the right to obtain a refund of an unauthorised payment transaction of which he or she has become aware if he or she delayed in notifying it to his or her provider with intent or gross negligence This is the case even if he or she notified it to the payment institution within 13 months from the debit date. A consumer holds a gold deposit account with the company Veracash SAS. In March 2017 Veracash sent him a new withdrawal and payment card. Between March and May 2017, daily withdrawals were made from that account. The consumer in question claims, however, that he never received that payment card or authorised such withdrawals.  The Regional Court, Évry, (France), followed by the Court of Appeal, Paris, (France), dismissed his request for refund on the ground that the withdrawals at issue had not been notified to Veracash ‘without undue delay’, as required by the Mon...

An Italian high school was fined by the data protection authority for using a fingerprint-based attendance system for administrative staff. The authority found the system lacked a legal basis and that employee consent was not a valid justification due to the power imbalance between employer and employee. Following a complaint, the Italian Supervisory Authority (SA) - Garante found out that a high school adopted a biometric recognition system that, in order to detect presence in office and prevent damage and vandalism, required the use of administrative staff's fingerprints. The workers involved were those who had given their consent and did not wish to use traditional methods of attesting their presence at the office. The Italian SA recalled that, according to the GDPR and the Italian Data Protection Code, the use of biometric data in the workplace requires a clear legal provision and specific guarantees for the rights of the data subjects. But the national provisions that prov...