Case C-588/26, Tetilovi – the same tariff in a different hand
Twice in seven years the Court has found that Bulgaria’s mandatory minimum lawyers’ fees, fixed by the profession’s own governing body, restrict competition. The legislature responded by rearranging who holds the pen. The Okrazhen sad Blagoevgrad asks whether anything else changed.
Facts
‘Eurobank Bulgaria’ AD is pursuing FZ and OM. Where a defendant cannot be found, Bulgarian civil procedure requires a special representative to be appointed. Under Articles 36 and 36a of the Law on the Legal Profession, as amended, that appointment is made not by the court but by the relevant regional council of the bar, following rules laid down in a regulation of the Supreme Council of the Legal Profession; the same council sets the representative’s fee, and the court is bound by both. The referring court notes that the Supreme Council and the regional councils are not public authorities. It has referred twenty-five questions, and asks in terms whether the amendments are an attempt to circumvent the Court’s earlier judgments. (Tetilovi is a fictitious case name assigned under the Court’s anonymisation practice; it does not correspond to any party.)
Questions Referred
The Official Journal notice sets out twenty-five questions, many restating the same points across Article 47 of the Charter and Article 101 TFEU. Those below are quoted verbatim; the full text is linked in the sources.
1. Does EU law preclude national legislation such as Articles 36 and 36a of the Zakon za advokaturata (Law on the Legal Profession; ‘the ZAdv’), under which the relevant council of the legal profession [of the law association] appoints the lawyer to act as representative under Article 36a of the Law on the Legal Profession and sets the amount of his or her fees?
2. Must Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and the principle of effective judicial protection be interpreted as meaning that, where a special representative is appointed, the independent national court alone must be authorised to determine the special representative and the amount of his or her fees on the basis of the specific circumstances of the case?
5. Must Article 47 … be interpreted as meaning that amendments to national procedural law may deprive the court of its power to appoint a special representative and delegate part of the judicial function to a professional association – a council of the legal profession of a law association?
9. Do the Visshia advokatski savet (Supreme Council of the Legal Profession, Bulgaria), as a body which adopts regulatory acts on the appointment of special representatives and the setting of their fees, and also the regional councils of the legal profession of the law associations, with respect to the appointment of special representatives which are not public authorities, act as an association of undertakings within the meaning of Article 101 TFEU, when appointing special representatives?
21. Where the competence to set lawyers’ fees is delegated to the bodies of the professional organisation of lawyers themselves, and those bodies act pursuant to a regulation adopted by the supreme body of that organisation jointly with the Ministry of Justice, is such an attempt to circumvent the legal effects [of the judgment] of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Case C-438/22 permissible?
25. Must Article 101(1) TFEU be interpreted as precluding national legislation under which the amount of fees for special representatives is set by a professional association of lawyers and becomes binding on the national courts by operation of law, without those courts being able to assess proportionality in a specific case?
Sources
OJ notice C/2026/4481 (EUR‑Lex) · Case file on CURIA · Charter of Fundamental Rights
Comment
Question 21 is the reference. Everything else is scaffolding around a court asking, in the politest available form, whether its own legislature has tried to legislate around a judgment of the Court of Justice.
The judgments in question are unusually clear. In Joined Cases C‑427/16 and C‑428/16, CHEZ Elektro Bulgaria (ECLI:EU:C:2017:890) the Court held that legislation which forbids a lawyer and client to agree a fee below the minimum set by the Supreme Council of the Legal Profession, and denies courts the power to award less, is capable of restricting competition under Article 101(1) TFEU. Seven years later, in Case C‑438/22, EM akaunt BG (ECLI:EU:C:2024:71), it went further on both limbs: such legislation constitutes a restriction “by object”, legitimate objectives cannot be invoked to take it outside Article 101(1), and a national court finding the tariff contrary to that provision must disapply it — including against a party who never signed any fee agreement at all.
Against that, the architecture now challenged looks less like reform than redistribution. The tariff has not been abolished; the power to apply it has been moved from the court to the bar, and the court is bound by the result. If a mandatory minimum fixed by a professional body offends Article 101 when a court is forbidden to go below it, it is hard to see why the same minimum, applied by that same professional body with the court removed from the decision altogether, would not. The referring court’s own framing at question 9 supplies the doctrinal hinge: the Supreme Council and the regional councils are not public authorities, so on the Court’s settled approach they are an association of undertakings, and their decisions are decisions of such an association.
The Charter limb runs alongside and may prove the more consequential. Questions 2, 5 and 17 are not about money but about who performs a judicial function. Appointing a representative for an absent defendant is an act of the court, done to make the proceedings fair; delegating it to the professional body from whose members the appointee is drawn, with no power in the court to choose otherwise or to review the choice, puts the guarantee in Article 47 in the hands of an interested party. A representative appointed by colleagues and paid according to their tariff may discharge the role impeccably — but the referring court is asking about the structure, not the individuals, and structure is what Article 47 tests.
Twenty-five questions is a great many, and much of the drafting repeats itself. That is worth noting rather than criticising: a national court that suspects deliberate circumvention has a strong incentive to close every exit in advance, so that no answer can be met by a further rearrangement. Whether the Court rewards that thoroughness or condenses it into two or three propositions, the reference is a rare public record of a domestic judge saying that the legislature appears to have responded to a judgment by relocating the problem.