Point of law: is it lawful to have in an export contract, under which silver is sold abroad, a clause establishing a “price corridor” in the form of admissible deviations from the price of the silver in the world market?

Alternative attitudes: 1) irrespective of the conditions of the contract, the selling price of gold must conform to mandatory prescriptions of the law, that is, to correspond to world market prices, which in this case are the prices in the London Metal Exchange (the view of the panel of judges which referred the case to the Presidium); or 2) the selling price of silver must depend not only upon exchange quotations, but also upon the prices applied by the participants of export-import transactions, when selling silver abroad in conditions comparable with the ones in the disputed contracts (the view of appellation and cassation courts).

Ratio decidendi: the first view is legally correct. It also flows from the text of the Judgment that, as long as the transaction price was to be determined in the procedure which was directly established by a law, the tax inspection had no duty to investigate the question of comparable conditions, when determining a market price of the commodity in question (i.e. silver).

Practical consequences: the Judgment does not provide for the possibility to reverse  inconsistent court decisions in earlier cases by virtue of Art 311 of the Commercial Procedure Code. Therefore, its ratio decidendi has only prospective force.