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09 March, 2022

Briefly discuss the advantages and disadvantages of financing imports under LTR

Advantages/ Importance of LTR:

A trust receipt is typically used when a bank has lent money for, say, import of goods, but the goods have to be released to the importer so they can be sold or prepared for sale.

But until the loan has been repaid, the goods still belong to the bank. The trust receipt evidences the bank's ownership of the goods. The borrower agrees to put the goods at the disposal of the bank if required to do so, to keep them separate from other goods etc. so they can be identified.

Trust receipts normally have a time limit associated with them. This is the time by which the borrower's business cycle can be expected to have generated the money to repay the loan.

It has to be said that the security provided by a trust receipt is rather poor. As its name suggests, the borrower is trusted not to violate the terms of the agreement.

There are frequent cases of banks finding that they can't actually recover their collateral.


Disadvantages of LTR:

One disadvantage of trust receipt financing is the requirement that a trust receipt be issued for specific goods. For example, if the security is autos in a dealer’s inventory, the trust receipts must indicate the cars by registration number. In order to validate its trust receipts, the lending institution must send someone to the borrower’s premises periodically to see that the auto numbers are correctly listed because auto dealers who are in financial difficulty have been known to sell cars backing trust receipts and then use the funds obtained for other operations rather than to repay the bank. Problems are compounded if the borrower has a number of different locations, especially if they are separated geographically from the lender. To offset these inconveniences, warehousing has come into wide use as a method of securing loans with inventory.