(1) The Council examined compliance of the defendant’s advertisements with the misleading advertising regulation which had been in place before introduction of the unfair commercial practices regulation.
According to the Council, the wording used by the defendant in the advertisements concerned, leads the consumer to believe that the cream is a medicine, whereas in reality the product was not registered as such with the competent Lithuanian authorities.
As a result, so held the Council, such statement should be considered as a blacklisted unfair commercial practice, i.e. a false claim that a product has been approved by a competent public authority (item 4).
(2) The Competition Council further referred to the defendant’s statements "Garmastan also protects from the infection which can result in a breast inflammation, i.e. mastitis" and “Contraindications and interaction with other medicines (…) suppress present inflammation”. It was noted by the Council that these statements indirectly imply that the cream “Garmastan” is able to cure illnesses. However, since the cream “Garmastan” was not registered with the competent public authority, there was no official document proving the said ability.
Therefore, the Council concluded that the said statements should be considered as falsely claiming that a product is able to cure illnesses, dysfunction or malformations, i.e. the blacklisted misleading commercial practice (item 17).