Confusions Caused by Deletion of the Freight Forwarder's Transport Documents under UCP 500 Article 30

Confusions Caused by Deletion of the Freight Forwarder’s Transport Documents under UCP 500 Article 30

L/C Monitor, Volume 7, Issue 4, July - August 2005

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During the revision of UCP 500, there have been some suggestions to remove Article 30 of UCP 500 from UCP 600. This article deals with freight forwarder’s transport documents. Most letter of credit practitioners are not aware of the confusions and risk involved by such a removal.
To understand my position, we first have to understand ...
Now, general speaking, we have four kinds of freight forwarders:

The small ones acting as ...
The mid-size ones acting as ...
The big ones owned by the large shipping lines acting as ...
Strong ones joining the FIATA or other local regulators such as ...

However, in the marketplace, the role or definition of a freight forwarder is ...
As explained above, in fact freight forwarders today play many different roles, ... So merely using the term ‘freight forwarder’ is ...
Some FIATA members, although labelled as freight forwarders, are in fact ...
Hence, to avoid confusions, I would propose that ...
If a definition is not given in Article 2 of UCP 600, then in UCP 600 commentary, it should clarify that ...
In other words, in transport documents, the document checker only ...
The purpose of naming a carrier is to ... I sincerely hope that the drafting of UCP 600 can proceed in this direction.

Mr. T. O. Lee FAE, MCIArb, MITD is a consultant, expert witness, trainer, and arbitrator specialized in resolving international trade disputes involving letters of credit, bills of lading, charter parties, Incoterms 2000, trade frauds, and China trade. He represents Canada in various ICC Commissions, such as Banking, Commercial Trade Practice, Electronic Commerce, Mediation, and Arbitration. He was appointed by ICC Paris in 2003 as a Member of the UCP 500 Revision (UCP 600) Consulting Group and is rated as one of the nine best letter of credit specialists in the world in a recent global survey by L/C Views of USA. He is a member of the United Nations International Multimodal Transport Association, Geneva; Accredited Arbitrator of the International Center for Letter of Credit Arbitration, USA; a Fellow and an Accredited Expert (Letter of Credit) of the Academy of Experts, Gray's Inn, England; and a columnist in ICC Documentary Credit Insight (1994-1999); 'Maritime Asia/Intermodal Asia' by Lloyd's of London Press, and 'Hong Kong Economic Journal.' He works closely with the ICC Commercial Crime Bureau on commercial frauds involving bills of lading, air waybills, and letters of credit. He also provides training for the carriers, freight forwarders, bankers, traders, insurers, and lawyers on these subjects. Articles on bills of lading, letters of credit, CDCS exercises, highlights of dispute cases resolved, and training programmes can be found in his website http://www.tolee.com.

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