The fraud rule under letter of credit law in the people’s republic of China and implications for Vietnam

Abstract

In international trade where the buyer and the seller do not have information about each other, letter of credit is used to assure the other parties' fears in the sale contract. For instance, the sellers are afraid of not being paid after sending the goods bought by the purchasers, meanwhile, the buyers have no reasonable grounds to believe the sellers will send the conforming goods under the requirements of the sale contracts. The letter of credit is a settlement between parties to reduce the risks and inserts security into the international sale of goods. However, there are fraudsters who tries to defraud the process of the letter of credit and fraud rule is expected to prevent this issue. There are countries tried to develop specific regulations for the letter of credit and fraud rule, one of those countries is the People's Republic of China (P.R.C). The practices of letter of credit in China had been an aiming point of critiques through years by letter of credit experts. In such wise, the Supreme People's Court of P.R.C has issued the Rules of the Supreme People's Court Concerning Several Issues in Hearing Letter of Credit Case (``the 2005 Rules'') in an effort to partly solve the problems. This paper will give a brief introduction about the letter of credit's operation, the law regulating the letter of credit in international trade as well as illustrate the specify law for the fraud rule in letter of credit law in P.R.C by emphasizing the history and summarizing the structure of the fraud rule. Thenceforward, the author will evaluate the case study in Vietnam to show the situation of Vietnam in these days and giving recommendations.