Nova Loses in Court Again

Nova has lost in court again. This should come as no surprise given the mountain of bad publicity surrounding the way it deceived and ripped off its customers.

According to the article on Yahoo! News, Nova lost its court battle with a man from Otsu. As is typical in this cases, the man took Nova to court over the non-payment of refunds. He paid 364,000 yen for lessons, and then decided to cancel his contract in June of 2006. The court ruled that Nova had unreasonably profited from the man's 204,000 yen in unused lessons and ordered Nova to pay him 165,000 yen in monies not refunded to him when the contract was canceled.

To top it all off, given everything that has happened up to now--the METI sanction, losing in the Supreme Court, and all of the bad publicity in between--Nova blames that it couldn't focus on the case because it was dealing with the METI sanction, and plans to appeal the ruling.

Comment: Let me get this straight: Nova complains that it was tied up dealing with the METI sanction but still wants to appeal an order to pay 165,000 yen? It wasn't that long ago when Nova tried to settle disputes such as this out of court, so why argue over a relatively small amount of money? Is Nova so desperate for cash that they are pulling out all the stops to staunch the bleeding? Ten bucks says that the quarterly report that Nova delayed until August 24 will shed some light on Nova's finances and it will be really ugly. Nova is operating paycheck to paycheck, and it can't go on like this for much longer.