UNITED CITY MERCHANTS (INVESTMENTS) LTD. and GLASS FIBRES AND EQUIPMENTS LTD. v ROYAL BANK OF CANADA (INCORPORATED IN CANADA) AND VITROREFUERZOS S.A. (FIRST THIRD PARTY) AND BANCO CONTINENTAL S.A. (SECOND THIRD PARTY) [On appeal from UNITED CITY MERCHANTS (INVESTMENTS) LTD. v. ROYAL BANK OF CANADA] HOUSE OF LORDS [1983] AC 168, [1982] 2 All ER 720, [1982] 2 WLR 1039, [1982] 2 Lloyd's Rep 1 20 May 1982 LORD DIPLOCK. My Lords, this appeal, which is the culmination of protracted litigation, raises two distinct questions of law which it is convenient to deal with separately. The first, which I will call the documentary credit point, relates to the mutual rights and obligations of the confirming bank and the beneficiary under a documentary credit. It is of general importance to all those engaged in the conduct and financing of international trade for it challenges the basic principle of documentary credit operations that banks that are parties to them deal in documents only, not in the goods to which those documents purport to relate. The second question, which I will call the Bretton Woods point, is of less general importance. It turns upon the construction of the Bretton Woods Agreements Order in Council 1946 and its application to the particular fact of the instant case. All parties to the transaction of sale of goods and its financing which have given rise to the appeal were represented at the original hearings before Mocatta J. The sellers and their own merchant bankers to whom they had transferred the credit as security for advances were the plaintiffs, the confirming bank was the defendant, the buyers and the issuing bank were joined as first and second third-parties respectively. The issuing bank admitted its liability to indemnify the confirming bank for any sums for which the latter as defendant should be held liable to the plaintiffs, and in the later stages of