Plaintiff’s obligation to purchase services up to a target amount of € 4,000,000 over a three-year period. Only if the target is reached at the end of the term, the provider of the services will cancel a claim of € 8,500,000 on the claimant from a previous contract. The defendant argues that this is a continuous service, but the court rejects that view. The additional assessments are canceled.
The court is of the opinion that this is a one-off service. The decisive factor for this is that until 31 December 2017 it was uncertain whether the claimant would meet the target and therefore whether the claim of [company F] on the claimant would lapse.
The defendant does not consider the argument that the monthly purchase obligation leads to a continuous service to be correct. The claimant has no compensation for the monthly minimum purchase amount of € 75,000. This compensation will only follow if the agreed amount of € 4,000,000 has been reached at the end of the period. As the claimant has rightly pointed out, although this is a continuous service, this concerns the service provided by [company F] to the claimant (telecom services), for which the claimant paid monthly. The claimant’s obligation to purchase services to the target of € 4,000,000 until the end of 2017, which was offset by the lapse of [company F’s] claim from 2014 if the target was met, is a one-off event.
It is also characteristic of a continuous service that no well-defined end result has been agreed. This could include subscriptions to supplies and services, rental of movable and immovable property and the provision of personnel. In this case there is a well-defined end result, namely achieving the target of € 4,000,000. The fact that a one-off performance can take a considerable time does not change this. This also follows from the decision of August 29, 2006, CPP2006 / 1796M.
The conclusion from the above is that the additional assessments for 2016 and for the first quarter of 2017 were wrongly imposed, because there is no continuous service.
Source: rechtspraak.nl
