The rights of consumers will continue to strengthen in 2022, and from the summer the authorities will be able to impose fines against double quality, the Ministry of Innovation and Technology (ITM) told Magyar Hírlap.
"We will no longer be helpless in the face of discrimination against Hungarian consumers, as the legal requirement establishing the basis for sanctioning will become stricter from the end of May. In accordance with the EU directive created at the initiative of Hungary, retailers that offer cheaper products to domestic customers can be fined up to half a billion forints," the statement quotes Tamás Schanda.
The Parliamentary and Strategic State Secretary added that about a third of the 120 product pairs examined this year had more active ingredients or more detailed information in the version available abroad than in the domestically available version with the same name.
As of May 28, 2022, double quality will be sanctioned as an unfair commercial practice. The term covers the harmful phenomenon when something is marketed in an EU member state in such a way that in another country, despite the identical brand name and appearance, the product is sold with a significantly different composition or other characteristics, they wrote.
According to their information, the fine that can be imposed from the end of May can reach 5 percent of the manufacturer's sales revenue, and in the case of multi-companies it can be a maximum of 500 million forints. The regulation recognizes that there may be legal differences that can be justified by objective factors. Such deviations are more typical of food products (e.g. due to seasonal and local ingredients), and the customer must be informed about them. The ITM and the consumer protection authority check the double quality of products that are not classified as food. In the case of foodstuffs, the National Food Chain Safety Office can act.
The accredited chemical industry laboratory of ITM compared 120 types of household-chemical and cleaning-cosmetic products with their product pairs available in Austria, Germany and Italy in 2021. The 420 different samples were taken from, among other things, washing and dishwashing detergents, stain removers, bleaches, fabric softeners, shampoos, shower gels and liquid soaps. About a third of the inspected product pairs, forty-one items, were found to have double quality, they wrote.
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Photo: MTI / Attila Kovács
