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Sign Deed of Indemnity Template

Hello, my name is Vitaliy Kozachenko. I am the managing director of Fortior Law a boutique practice based in Geneva Switzerland. One of our areas of expertise is financial law and in this video I am going to discuss letters of indemnity in the context of international trade. I have worked on one of the leading English cases in this field, Euro-Asian Oil v Abilo, Credit Suisse and I hope you will find my experience useful. In this video I am going to start by analysing the context in which letters of indemnity are used in international trade and will then discuss the most common risks faced by issuers of letters of indemnity and by banks which countersign them. In international trade, the context in which banks often deal with letters of indemnity may be described in the following diagram: a seller sells goods to a buyer, the buyer pays for the goods by means of a letter of credit provided by the buyer's bank. The seller in order to draw under the letter of credit provided by the buyer's bank must usually provide a number of documents specified in that letter of credit. Almost invariably, one of such documents is a bill of lading for the goods loaded by the seller upon a means of transport - usually a ship. But for various reasons it may be impossible to obtain the bills of lading immediately and/or in time to get paid under the letter of credit. It is to solve this problem that a practice has developed whereby a seller instead of providing the bills of lading to draw under the letter of credit provides a letter of indemnity effectively indemnifying the buyer against the risks which it might face as a result of not having the bills of lading. If the buyer or the buyer's bank do not trust in a seller's creditworthiness they will usually require that the seller's letter of indemnity be countersigned by a bank. A letter of indemnity is essentially a contractual document whereby the seller makes certain promises to the buyer and the buyer's bank in exchange for which the buyer's bank makes payment under the letter of credit to the seller without presentation of the bills of lading. A bank which countersigns a letter of indemnity effectively makes the same promises as the seller. As with any contractual documents where there is a dispute the parties may face the following issues. Firstly, who are the parties to the contract - in our case letter of indemnity and who may rely on the promises contained in it? Secondly, what is the precise nature of the promises contained in the contract and have they been fulfilled? And thirdly, is it a contract subject to a specific set of rules such as a guarantee or is the indemnifying bank simply liable in the same way as the seller? I will discuss these three issues in the remainder of this video. In English law there is...