Facts
The appellant, [X.] , was president of the board of the foundation [Y.] , which operated a children's clinic in [A.] . The respondent, [Z.] , was the medical director and clinic director. Following conflicts over organizational and financial issues related to the clinic's operation, [X.] was voted out as president of the board, which he refused to acknowledge. The Federal Foundation Supervisory Authority dismissed a supervisory complaint and imposed the procedural costs on the foundation. [Z.] appealed to the Federal Administrative Court, which discontinued the proceedings as moot and split the costs evenly between the parties.
The appellant filed an appeal and requested that the cost allocation be overturned and that he not be charged any costs. He argued that the respondent, as the formal instigator of the supervisory procedure, should bear the court costs.
Considerations
The Federal Court examined the admissibility of the appeal and found that the value in dispute for the claims contested before the lower court was sufficient. It addressed the question of whether the lower court had rightly based the cost allocation on the indirect instigation of the proceedings, rather than on the formal instigation of the proceedings.
The court found that the lower court had correctly considered the initial decision of the Federal Foundation Supervisory Authority to be moot, as the supervisory procedure itself had become moot. It found that the initial cost ruling had fallen away as a mere ancillary point of the main issue and that the initial party costs were to be reallocated.
The…