Stop the ECG and ALL similar guides!!!

Petition the European Parliament to protest against the mailing of contracts that can mislead

If you have been affected by the activities of the European City Guide or any of the other directories listed on this website, please take the time to fill out and send the petition below. The more people write in, the greater the chances that the EU will act against guides that mail this sort of contract.
There is no time like the present, please read on, this will only take 5-10 minutes to complete.

If you have not been directly affected by these guides but still wish to register your concern, please Click Here

CONTENTS

Notes (Please Read Before Submitting)
How to submit your Petition
After you Have submitted
Notes (Please Read Before) Submitting

The Objective of this petition is simple; the EU has the power to extend existing legislation which protects consumers to Business to Business (B2B) Transactions. The EU is the only organization that can protect small businesses on a Europe wide scale thus stopping the ECG in its tracks!

The petition specifically names The European City Guide (ECG) (Spain), Novachannel AG (Tourist Directory) (Switzerland), Construct Data Publishers Verlag AG (The FAIR Guide)(Austria), TVV Telefax Directory (Germany), Intercable Verlag AG (Switzerland), IT&T AG (Switzerland), Deutscher Adressdienst GmbH (Germany), EUCO DATA S.A (Switzerland) and IBS Limited (UK). It would also cover any future company that used similarly worded/designed contracts.

The Draft petition below needs slight amendment before you send it off, Look for ** in the text and amend at this point.
If you are involved with a guide other than the ECG you can still use the petition; however please amend it accordingly.

StopECG would prefer it if you added your own experience to the text in order that the members of Parliament understand fully the issue. If relevant to your experience, please include:

Time-consumed and cost. Faxes, phone calls, registered letters, legal advice.
Damage to morale (stress, panic etc.)
Have you parted with money? If so how much
Any other personal notes on the affects this experience has had on you/your company

READ!!!! Once you have higlighted and copied the petition below you are ready to go, however please read the rest of this page, it contains important information and if you don't read it fully your petition will not have the maximum impact!

You can copy the text in the box below, or Click here to access the Petition in MS word format Please modify it as described in the notes above. Immediately below the text of the petition is a link to the European Parliament, followed by notes on how best to fill out their webform.

PETITION TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

CAUSE OF CONCERN

In **Insert Year** the European City Guide, S.L. of Valencia, Spain, (hereinafter referred to as ECG) sent me a form to fill in with my company details in exchange for an apparently free-of-charge entry into a European catalogue.

It was only after receiving the first invoice that I realised that the form was actually a contract that purportedly tied me to a substantial annual payment for 3 years, The Contract is then self renewing in apparent perpetuity.

Ever since ECG has been requesting payment of the 'overdue sum' both directly and through The would-be debt recovery company **Delete As Applicable** Premium Recovery AG/Gravis Inkasso Gmbh; despite rulings by the Fair Trade and Competition Authority in Italy and the Catalan Authority in Barcelona declaring various version of the contract to be deceptive.

This has damaged us both economically (phone calls, faxes, registered letters, legal advice fees, loss of time) and mentally (anxiety, stress, etc.)

The expenses borne by our company, multiplied by the number of affected companies (over 50,000 in the ECG's catalogue alone) amount to considerable damage to the European business sector! Combine this with the remarkably similar activities of Novachannel AG (Tourist Directory) (Switzerland), Construct Data Publishers Verlag AG (The FAIR Guide)(Austria), TVV Telefax Directory (Germany), Intercable Verlag AG (Switzerland), IT&T AG (Switzerland), Deutscher Adressdienst GmbH (Germany), EUCO DATA S.A (Switzerland) and IBS Limited (UK) and the number of European companies affected almost certainly exceeds 100,000

As well as affecting companies within Europe several of these guides also ply their trade elsewhere, affecting in total some 200 countries and perhaps another 100,000 companies, thus giving a poor impression of business practice within the EU.

Research by one of the opposition websites (see end of petition) suggests that up to 15% of companies actually pay, usually under duress and as a result of receiving threats of legal action; the average amount paid is around a thousand pounds. Although legal action is often threatened there is no evidence that any of these guide companies has pursued the issue in the courts.

REQUEST
I/We request that the European Parliament intervene accordingly to prevent companies such as ECG from indiscriminately mailing contracts that can mislead and from demanding money where there is reasonable doubt that the contract was mailed in good faith.

We ask for a law to protect us, and appeal to, when faced with such an increasing problem. Such Laws already exist in consumer protection relating to distance selling. These need to be extended to all Business To Business marketing

I/We also request that the practice of knowingly mailing deceptive forms be expressly prohibited by criminal law. It should be a statutory offence to mass mail a form soliciting for entries in a database or directory, knowing or if the reasonable man would suspect that due to the layout, wording, or context of supply, of the form, a significant proportion of those people who respond will do so not realizing the full extent of the additional liability that the form purports to impose on them. This should include forms that give the impression at first sight that they concern an existing contractual or administrative arrangement, whereas in fact they are solicitations for new contractual arrangements.

The offence should also include any steps to collect debts, purporting to arise as a result of the return of such forms, and the sale of such debts to third parties.

We/I patiently await your strong stand against the present situation.

Yours sincerely
**Insert Name**
**Insert Company**

P.S.
I hope you will take the time to read some of the many websites that have arisen in opposition to these guides

http://www.stopecg.org (English)
http://www.osservatorioaziende.it (Italian)
http://www.beschwerdezentrum.org/ (German)
http://www.arnaques.be.tf/index.shtml (French)
http://sweb.cz/antiecg/ (Czech)
http://www.svenskhandel.se/Default.asp (Swedish)
http://obrona6.webpark.pl/ (Polish)

How to submit your Petition

Please proceed to:
http://www.europarl.eu.int/parliament/public/petition/submit.do (Select your desired language using top-right Navigation)
and submit the petition direct to the European Parliament

Filling out the Petition form

Please fill out all your details in the first part of the form, including your email address
Under Name of the association: you can put www.stopECG.org (Optional) or the name of your own company
Under If the Committee on Petitions declares your petition admissible, do you agree to its being considered in public? Please Check Yes
Under Subject of your petition (in brief): Please put
Request to the European Parliament to act against Business to Business contracts that can mislead
Under Text of your petition: you should put the full text as collected from this page and modified by you.

CHECK, Have you searched the petition for ** and amended it at these points??

After you Have submitted

You are nearly done... The last thing we would like you to do is to send a copy of the petition to your MEP (Member European Parliament) if you do not know who your MEP is, click the one of the links below and look them up. You may find that you are represented by more than one MEP, if so, please contact them all!!
http://www.writetothem.com/ (enter your postcode to see list of MEPs, you can then fax the petition direct from the webform!)
http://www.europarl.org.uk/uk_meps/MembersMain.htm (UK Members)
If you live outside the UK, Please navigate from http://www.europarl.eu.int/ to your country
Eventually all this letter writing will pay off.

Please email a copy of your petition to petizione@osservatorioaziende.it
Vincenzo runs the excellent website http://www.osservatorioaziende.it/ and is the person who initiated this campaign.