Attorney Abby Represented a Canadian Company to Win Litigation and Suppliers should Jointly Refund

In 2021, a Canadian company in Vancouver approached lawyers Larry Zhou and Abby Wang of Landing (Shenzhen) Law Office for legal help. Because of the limited supply capacity of the original long-term supplier, the Vancouver company decided to purchase over US$60,000 of nitrile gloves from a foreign trade company in South China after comparison and investigation on the Alibaba website. Both parties placed orders, made payments and signed contracts on Alibaba. However, after the payment was made, the foreign trade company kept delaying the delivery of the goods and refused to refund the Vancouver company on the grounds that the factory was out of stock and the factory did not reply, resulting in the Vancouver company losing its orders and seriously damaging its reputation in the region.

Although the Vancouver company investigated the Chinese supplier prior to the transaction and placed the payment through a third-party platform, it was still inevitably caught in a passive position, encountering problems such as the supplier's refusal to ship or refund, losing own orders due to the supplier's delay.

After representing the case, our lawyers held conference calls with the Vancouver company and quickly grasped the background and guided the client through the notarization and authentication of the documents. During the litigation stage, the lawyers successfully added two shareholders of the Chinese supplier and succeeded in freezing the bank deposits of the supplier and the shareholders' personal assets, thus taking the initiative in the litigation.

At the trial, the lawyers performed well. Even though the defendant denied any involvement in the transaction and suggested that it was not the plaintiff who made the payment and that it was a third party who sold the goods, the plaintiff's lawyers responded one by one, which eventually led the court to basically adopt the advice of our lawyer, and ruled that the Chinese supplier company should refund the payment to the Canadian company, pay interests, compensate for notary and certification fees, and hold the two shareholders of the company jointly and severally liable.

The outcome of the case was very satisfactory to the Canadian client.