Investigation needed… but apparently the English and German versions of a directive materially differ. And it might explain why many German ATMs do not give receipts.
Is it safe to assume the original version of an EU directive is in English?
The point of a directive is that it outlines what kind of law should be written in each member state, but each member state has a lot of leeway regarding how they decide to implement the directive.
Then there are another category of EU laws: Regulations. Regulations must be precisely the same in each member state.
But, if what you say is true and it’s indeed in a directive instead of a regulation, then the reason is simply that Germany decided to implement the directive in a way that doesn’t require ATMs to give receipts.A directive defines the rough outlines of a law, a regulation is a ready-to-use law that cannot be altered in any manner whatsoever and is automatically valid without parliamentary interference by the member states.
I can understand that a transposition of a directive might be flexible. But in the case at hand, I believe the German translation of the directive was not even true to the intended directive. So it seems some intent was lost before the German transposition was even drafted.
