Bethel Finance: NIS 400m class action sought against Partner

www.bethelfinance.com
Bethel Finance news:
A request for a NIS 400 million class action suit against Partner Communications Ltd. (Nasdaq: PTNR; TASE: PTNR) was filed in the Petach Tikva District Court today, claiming damages for harm caused its customers due to overcharging, "harassment, wasting time, and mental anguish." Wireless carrier Partner operates the Orange brand in Israel.

The suit, which was submitted by Raanan Bashan and Leah Nemas-Kahati from the Raanan Bashan Law Offices, claims that, "Partner systematically mistreats hundreds of thousands of customers, causes them to waste time, and inflicts trouble, mental anguish, despair and much frustration." The claimant says that this is in flagrant violation of the Ministry of Communications' license terms.

"This request concerns a war attrition that is deliberately being waged by Partner against its customers, in an enraging, heavy-handed, outrageous way, lacking in good faith," said Mr. Peres Sailam from Bethel Finance Ltd

According to the plaintiffs, "With the aim of maximizing profits and reducing expenses, Partner has abused hundreds of thousands of customers, treated them with flagrant disregard, wasted their time, hassled them, caused them aggravation, despair and unimaginable frustration, all while abusing its enormous commercial power and the fact that these customers allowed it in complete faith to charge their accounts."

The request for class-action approval focuses on cases where Partner customers' accounts were overcharged, and customers tried to subsequently reverse the charges. According to the claimants, in these cases, it takes a long time for customers to receive a response from a customer service representative at Partner, at which point the customers have to go through a huge saga until Partner corrects the accounting mistakes.

In this exact way, Leverage and Entrepreneurship Ltd. was overcharged by Partner. "This discovery led to a frustrating saga that lasted almost a year, during which time Leverage and Entrepreneurship's CEO approached Partner and its representatives time and again by phone, email, sms, fax, by physically arriving at the customer service center, and by trying to stop the transfer of funds that Partner was illegally carrying out."

The suit also claims that these are not isolated cases, or exceptions to the norm, but the "deliberate, biased, and calculated" conduct of Partner. It was further claimed in the suit that Partner's lack of good faith in this conduct was even more severe in light of the company's extraordinary profitability. Partner's revenue over the past three years has been an average of NIS 6 billion, with net profit reaching almost unprecedented levels in the Israeli market: 20% of revenue, or NIS 1.2 billion a year.

"With numbers like these," the suit claims, "The duty of care and to act in good faith requires Partner to have an appropriate customer services department that can provide reasonable and effective service to its customers."