Insurance company chasing us across European Borders?

-We rented a flat in Germany according to the contract they crossed out the need to take out insurance on the property as the owner had insurance. Our letting agent certainly didn't advise us to take out insurance. One night our small daughter tipped up the bath water and it went down a hole by the radiator down pipe to the landlords flat below ruining his mattress and some experts to set up equipment to dry out the floor - nothing structural was needed. Since then we moved back to the UK. The landlord's insurance company is chasing us for payment threatening if we do not reply we are liable for a large fine. It seems they are just being heavy handed with this threat: our options are to

1) Ignore them - in which case if they go to court they may need to chase us across national boundaries,

2) Claim we don;t understand German and get them to translate everything into English to piss them off.

3) Argue we are not liable and send them a copy of the contract with the crossings out - the problem is they can always argue that we crossed out those lines ourselves afterwards - it is hard to prove we didn't as the landlord may have lost his copy or get the agent to falsify a copy. It is going to be hard doing this in German which we are not too fluent at.

What would you advise?The first thing you should do is post this to Yahoo Answers Germany or Yahoo Answers UK, not to Yahoo Answers U.S.



Crossing out the requirement for you take out insurance does not mean that you do not have to pay for damage. It means that you do not have to take out insurance. You still could have taken out insurance, even if they did not advise it.