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The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has decided that Nova Corp., the nation's largest language school chain, violated the Specified Commercial Transaction Law and ordered it to partially suspend business. Saying that Nova committed 18 types of violations, the ministry imposed a six-month ban on new contracts of more than one year or more than 70 hours of lessons with customers. It is of grave concern that the school chain was involved in the irregularities. Top management must reflect on what the firm did and change.
Nova distributed pamphlets saying that students could book lessons at any time and at any Nova school, when in fact it was difficult to keep the promise due to a shortage of teachers. It ran ads stating that the admission fee was exempted "only for now" when the fee had always been exempted. When students canceled contracts, Nova refunded smaller than promised amounts.
Nova also misled some people to believe that their contract "cooling-off" period had expired and prevented them from canceling their contracts. The Nova headquarters distributed manuals on how to deal with complaints about contracts. But the manuals taught illegal ways of dealing with such complaints.
Behind the illegal business practices seems to be Nova's aggressive policy to expand the number of its schools to 1,000. It now has just over 900 schools. Suffering a loss in two consecutive years, Nova had a consolidated loss of ¥2.4 billion in fiscal 2006. The punish-ment meted out by METI may frustrate Nova's plan to go into the black. If so, it would only be reaping what it sowed.
The Japan Times Weekly: June 23, 2007
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経済産業省は、英会話学校最大手のNOVAに対し、特定商取引法に違反する行為があったとして、一部業務を停止するよう命じた。今回の行政処分で、NOVAは今後半年間にわたり、1年または70時間を超える長期契約の締結を禁じられた。NOVAは真摯に反省し、経営方針を変えなければならない。
NOVAは「いつでも、簡単に予約が取れる」をうたい文句に受講者を増やしてきたが、実際は都合のよい曜日や時間帯に授業を受けたくても予約が取れないことが多く、中途解約時のトラブルも相次いできた。クーリングオフ制度の適用を拒否したり、利用者からの苦情に備え、違法な対応を指示したマニュアルまで用意していた。
NOVAは2年連続で赤字を出し、06年度には24億円の連結赤字を計上した。今後の黒字化は困難になるだろうが、それは自らまいた種である。
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