Federal Court of Justice: Innkeeper fails with lawsuit against insurance

Because he had to close his restaurant because of the corona pandemic, a restaurateur demanded money from his insurance company. This refused because Covid-19 was not explicitly mentioned in the contract – rightly so, according to the BGH.

The highest German civil court has confirmed: There is no money from the insurance for the innkeeper from Schleswig-Holstein. Even if he had to close his restaurant in spring 2020 due to the shutdown – according to the Federal Court of Justice, Covid-19 was not mentioned in the small print of his insurance contract. All sorts of other diseases, but not Corona.

The risk for insurers would be too great

And you can’t read that into it either: the insurers didn’t want to and couldn’t offer protection for every new illness that might only appear years later. The risk is too great; they certainly couldn’t calculate their premiums on that basis. Because Corona was not mentioned in the contract, the innkeeper had no insurance cover for it either.

The highest federal judges have thus made the same decision as many other lower instances. Most of the operators of restaurants had failed with a lawsuit against their insurance company. In the meantime, liability for corona risks has probably been expressly excluded in most new insurance contracts anyway.