ICC Announces New Rules for Demand Guarantees

ICC recently announced a revised version of the Uniform Rules for Demand Gauarantees (URDG 758) destined to apply to hundreds of billions of dollars of demand Guarantees securing monetary and performance obligations in a wide array of international and domestic contracts.

After two years of work, the revised URDG758 has been approved with a 96% vote at the ICC Banking Commission meeting held in Brussels in November 2009. URDG 758 will be implemented from 1 July 2010.

The summary for the update of ISBP 681 :

Since the ISBP, ICC Publication 645, was prepared during the lifetime of UCP 500, its update with the purpose of aligning it with UCP 600 was expected by all parties concerned. The UCP 600 Drafting Group reviewed and updated the ISBP to bring its contents in line with the substance and style of the new rules, thus creating the new Publication No. 681, the content of which was approved by the Banking Commission unanimously during its April 2007 Meeting in Singapore. The updated ISBP was published to coincide with the implementation of UCP 600 on 1st July, 2007.

Changes :

The first necessity was to replace UCP 500 article numbers with those of UCP 600. Second, where it was felt appropriate, the content of some paragraphs that appear in Publication 645 and that have been covered in UCP 600 have been removed from the updated version of the ISBP. This explains the reduction in the number of paragraphs from 200 to 185. The speaker shall try to identify what has been removed, amended and added by noting the respective paragraph number of the "old" ISBP and giving the corresponding new number as it appears in the new version, section-by-section.