Obligation to investigate versus obligation to disclose in case of non-conformity of sale

In Bedrijfsjuridische berichten (Bb), 2016, no. 86, Marcel Ruygvoorn wrote the article "Obligation to investigate vs obligation to disclose in case of non-conformity of sale".

Section 7:17 of the Netherlands Civil Code stipulates that a supplied object must be in conformity with the agreement and that an object is not in conformity with the agreement if, given the nature of the object and the statements of the seller about it, it does not have the qualities that the buyer could have expected on the basis of the agreement. It then sets out what the buyer could, in principle, expect. This is the conformity requirement for sale agreements. However, the key question remains what the buyer could have expected in this concrete case. The way in which the conformity requirement of Section 7:17 of the Netherlands Civil Code is to be interpreted and, more in particular, how the buyer's obligations to investigate are related to the seller's obligations to disclose, has been a cause of concern for some time. A recent Supreme Court judgement sheds more light on this issue.

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