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THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES

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CO 537/1374

THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES

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Moreover,

itionis not well taken. In the first place, the defendant was not

compelled to pay under threats of death by any order of the Japanese.

The Administrative Order (Exhibit C) only provided for the liquidation

of banks, among which was the plaintiff Bank, and set forth the instruc-

tions as to how such liquidation should be carried out; and Order No. 1

(Exhibit B) threatened with death those debtos who did not pay their debts

on the pretext that in the near future a moratorium order would be issued,

but not any debtor who merely failed to pay his debt. Certainly the

defendant was not among those first mentioned.

it could allow

the foreclosure of its mortgage without prejudice to contesting, in due time, the legality of such foreclosure, since all that was required of it was the payment of its debt or, upon default, the foreclosure of the security. The defendant should not have lost sight of the illegality of

the acts of the invader concerning the sequestration and disposition of

the credit in question, either under the known laws of the country or

under International Law. In the second place, the cases of Bishop of

Jaro vs. De la Peha and Mandeville vs. Bank of Louisiana have no similarity

with the case at bar. In those cases, what were confiscated were funds

deposited in the Banks, whereas in this case the thing that was confis-

cated was a credit which was collected with the knowledge and consent of

the debtor, but without the consent of the creditor, and the payment was made with currency different from that loaned and which was not legal tender under the laws of the country. Judging from the little value of

the money with which the credit was paid, it might even be said that the

defendant made the payment fem its own pecuniary advantage. As for

the rest, in the case of De la Peha, as was seen in the later case in- stituted by his heirs (43 Phil. 430), there was no clear evidence that the funds in question, confiscated by the American military forces, did not belong to the insurgents and that the military forces did not have the authority to confiscate them so as to have their act of confiscation considered as a real force majeure. It is known that the United States had, by law, authority to confiscate property of the insurgents who rose against its government, In the case of Mandeville v. Bank of Louisiana

for

on the other hand, it has been Been that the real issue, as was stated by the Supreme Court of Louisiana in the case of Nelligan v. Citizens