ICC Digital Library Forum

Jeremy,

some bankers I have encountered are of the opinion that all that is required is a knowledge of the UCP in order to work on L/Cs, others try to garnish as much information as they can about the documents they expect to deal with, official opinions, legal cases etc, but most bankers fall somewhere in between.

When I asked my last question I was trying to determine which of these notional categories you fell into. I can understand that when a banker refers to international standard practice, he intends to refer to banking practice, but some of us are not bankers and therefore do not make that assumption.

If you do not take account of any international standard practice other than banking practice, then you exclude things such as Incoterms, standard Lloyds clauses etc, but I find this hard to believe. Is this correct ?

Laurence

Laurence,

Ultimately, I look to English law in establishing the test(s) of facial compliance. If I understand it correctly, a banker is neither expected nor supposed to apply any knowledge, other than banking, in determining facial compliance. The exception being knowledge that they have acquired by virtue of the bank’s day-to-day doc credit operations (see Kredietbank Antwerp v Midland Bank plc, Court of Appeal, 1999).

I am not sure what you mean by ‘excluding’ Incoterms (I can see that they are relevant at the issuing/advising stage, but I would anticipate that they rarely require consideration at the document examination stage) or ‘standard Lloyds clauses’ (I imagine -perhaps erroneously- this is a reference to the ‘cover’ provisions that can be encountered in insurance documents issued by Lloyd’s underwriters; it is unclear to me why a banker -involved in credit operations- would need a knowledge of them).

Jeremy