The Applicant's Liability of Examination of Document and Notification of the Discrepancies in Credit Transaction

신용장거래에 있어서 개설의뢰인의 서류심사 및 통지의무

This study is related with the judgements of our country's supremcourt against the transaction of Letter of Credit which is beneficiary's fraudulent trade deal. In this case I think to analyse the judgements and to present the basic grounds on which the judgements were established. In Letter of Credit transaction, there are the major parties, such as, beneficiary, issuing bank, or confirming bank and the other parties such as applicant, negotiating bank, advising bank and paying bank. Therefore, in this cases, the beneficiary, the French Weapons' Supplier who did not shipped the commodities, created the false Bill of Lading, let his dealing bank make payment against the documents presented by him and received the proceeds from the negotiating bank or collecting bank, thereafter was bankrupted and escaped. For the first time, even though the issuing bank conceived that the presented documents were inconsistent with the terms of L/C. it did not received the payment approval from the applicant against all the discrepancies, made the negotiating bank pay the proceeds to exporter and thereafter, delivered the documents to the applicant long after the time of the issuing bank's examination of documents. The applicant who received the documents from the issuing bank, instantly did not examine the documents and inform to the issuing bank whether he accepted the documents or not. Long time after, applicant tried to clear the goods through custom when he knew the bill of ladings were false and founded out the documents had the other discrepancies which he did not approved. As the results, the applicant, Korea Army Transportation Command claimed, that the issuing bank must refund his paid amount because issuing bank examined the documents unreasonably according to u.c.p 500 Act 13th, 14th. In spite of the applicant's claim, the issuing bank argued that it paid the proceeds of L/C reasonably after receiving the applicant's approval of an discrepancy of document, the delayed shipment, but for concerning the other discrepancies, the trivial ones, the applicant did not examined the document and noticed the discrepancies in reasonable time. Therefore the applicant sued the issuing bank for refunding it's paid proceeds of L/C. Originally, this cases were risen between Korea Exchange Bank and Korea Army Transportation Command. As result of analysing the case, the contents of the case case have had same procedure actually, but the lower courts, the district and high courts all judged the issuing bank was reasonable and did not make an error. As analysing these supreme court's judgements, the problem is that whether there are the applicant's liability of examining the documents and informing its discrepancies to the issuing bank or not, and if the applicant broke such a liabilities, it lost the right of claiming the repayment from issuing bank. Finally to say, such applicant's liabilities only must be existed in case the documents arrived to the issuing bank was delivered to the applicant within the time of the documents examination according to u.c.p 500 Act 14, d. i. But if any the documents were delivered to applicant after time of the documents examination, the applicant had not such liabilities because eventhough after those time the applicant would have informed to the issuing bank the discrepancies of documents, the issuing bank couldn't receive repayment of its paid proceeds of document from the negotiating bank. In the result after time of issuing bank's examination of documents, it is considered that there's no actual benefit to ask the applicant practice it's liability. Therefore finally to say. I concluded that the Suprem Court's judgement was much more reasonable. In the following, the judgements of the supreme court would be analysed more concretely, the basic reasons of the results be explained and the way of protecting such L/C transaction would be presented.