Details:
The U.S. company (the defendant) entered a contract with a Vietnamese company (the plaintiff), and a dispute arose between the two parties. However, the dispute was resolved by the Arbitration Council without the defendant’s participation, and the defendant was found liable.
Lesson Learned:
In this case, Article 284 of the Civil Code 2005 stipulates that ” When the obligee changes his/her place of residence or head office, he/she must notify the obligor of the change and must bear extra expenses resulting from the change of the place of residence or head office, unless otherwise agreed upon.”
The regulation only mentions the party with the right to change their address, not the party with the obligation. In this situation, the issue arose when the address was changed without notifying the other party. This resulted in the defendant not receiving the necessary legal documents related to the arbitration proceedings when the dispute was ongoing with the plaintiff. The defendant later requested the annulment of the arbitration award based on this reason.
However, in arbitration procedures, the responsibility is only to “send” the necessary information to the parties, and the law does not require the parties to receive the information sent by the arbitration tribunal. Therefore, the tribunal only needs to send documents to the address provided by the parties (especially the address mentioned in the contract if no other address is known). If the documents are sent to the address specified in the contract (when no other address is available) but the recipient does not receive them, the tribunal can still proceed with the legal procedure.
The defendant’s absence is detrimental because they do not have the opportunity to defend their interests. Changing the address without notifying the other party leads to the above-mentioned unfavorable consequences. Therefore, learning from this case, businesses should ensure that they notify their partners of any address change after a transaction has been established. If they fail to do so, they will have to bear the negative consequences.
