Wakilii

Hwan Sung Industries Ltd v Tajdin and others (Civil Appeal 8 of 2008)

Supreme Court · [2009] UGSC 39 · 2009 Appeal Dismissed ✦ AI-generated summary ↓ Download
Jurisdiction
Uganda
Case Type
Second appeal to the Supreme Court from a Court of Appeal judgment in a sale of goods dispute
Decision
Appeal dismissed and Court of Appeal decision confirmed; appellant liable to pay the respondents US$8,000 balance with interest plus costs

The full judgment

Read the complete, verbatim text of this judgment.

Sign in to read the full judgment
Cited — treatment unverified cited in 2 (treatment unverified) Derived from citing cases in the Wakilii corpus — not an assertion that this case is good law.

AI-generated summary. This summary was generated by AI from the full text of the judgment. It may contain errors or omissions — always read the source judgment before relying on it.

Holding

The Supreme Court dismissed a second appeal and upheld the Court of Appeal. The contract was a sale of goods by both description and sample under section 16 of the Sale of Goods Act, so the buyer had to prove that the goods examined were those supplied and that they failed to correspond with the contract sample. The appellant's witnesses examined 'orange flavour' samples not connected to the 'orange oil' supplied, so non-conformity was not proved. The trial judge wrongly decided the case on an unframed 'fitness for purpose' issue, obscuring the real issues. The respondents' counter-claim for the balance of the price was rightly upheld.

Facts

The appellant, a local manufacturer of ice cream, ordered 2,000 kg of orange oil in December 2000 for use in its 'Cool Cool Bar' brand. A written contract was made for sale by description and sample, the respondents having supplied a sample before signing. The appellant paid US$8,000 as 50% part payment, with the balance of US$8,000 due after delivery. The respondents supplied the goods. The appellant claimed on examination that the goods were unsatisfactory, had them tested internally and by the Uganda National Bureau of Standards, rejected them, and demanded a refund. However, the samples examined by the witnesses were described as 'orange flavour' and were not shown to be connected to the 'orange oil' the respondents supplied, nor compared with the contract sample. The respondents counter-claimed for the unpaid balance of US$8,000.

Issues

  1. Whether the Court of Appeal failed to evaluate the evidence on record and thereby reached wrong conclusions.
  2. Whether the trial judge based his decision on an issue that was neither framed nor argued by the parties.
  3. Whether the respondents' counter-claim for the balance of the contract price was proved.

Orders

  • Appeal dismissed.
  • Decision of the Court of Appeal confirmed.
  • Costs awarded to the respondents in the Supreme Court and in the courts below.

Key headnotes

Contract Law — Sale of Goods — Sale by Description and Sample (Sale of Goods Act s.16)
Where goods are sold by both description and sample, the seller is obliged to supply goods corresponding with both the description and the sample, and a dispute as to whether the goods accord with the contract must be resolved by reference to the nature of that contract.
Evidence — Burden of Proof — Correspondence of Goods with Sample
A buyer who rejects goods for non-conformity must prove both that the goods examined were the goods actually supplied and that they failed to correspond with the contract sample; where the examined samples cannot be connected to the goods supplied, non-conformity is not established.
Civil Procedure — Framing and Amendment of Issues — Order 15 CPR
Although a trial court has power to frame or amend issues to determine the real matters in controversy, it may not frame an issue that obscures the real matters in dispute, and the parties must be heard on any new issue before the court decides upon it.
Civil Procedure — First Appellate Court — Duty to Re-evaluate Evidence
A first appellate court has a duty to reconsider and re-evaluate the whole of the evidence on record and to arrive at its own conclusions, and a litigant cannot fault it for doing so where that duty has been properly discharged.

Legislation cited (3)

  • Sale of Goods Act s.16
  • Civil Procedure Rules O.15 r.1(5)
  • Civil Procedure Rules O.15 r.5(1)

Cases cited (2)

  • Oriental Insurance Brokers Ltd v Transocean Ltd (Civil Appeal No. 55 of 1995)
  • Odd Jobs v Mubia (1970) EA 476
Source: this page presents Wakilii’s issue analysis and metadata for a publicly reported Ugandan judgment. Any AI-generated summary is marked as such. Judgment text is sourced from the Uganda Legal Information Institute (ulii.org). Wakilii is not affiliated with ULII.