
Mainichi Shimbun, Japan - July 14
Nova Co., Japan's biggest chain of English conversation schools, has suffered a damaging blow after the Tokyo District Court ordered it to return money to a woman who did not use lessons paid for in advance....
...In 1999, the woman started attending classes at Nova, then in December 2001 spent about 710,000 yen to pay for another 600 points.
Nova's regulations say points can be used for three years. But what it didn't tell the woman was that, under the company's illegal regulations, any points she hadn't used in a year were automatically reduced by one third.