Israeli investors entered into an investment agreement in a Mexican company for the purpose of promoting a real estate project in Mexico. The agreement was written in English while the appendices attached thereto were in Spanish.
The Court determined that the language in which the documents were written cannot serve to release the investors from the obligations they have assumed. A signee is presumed to have read the document executed by him and understood and agreed to its contents. If the signee did not do so, then this does not absolve him of the obligation he undertook in that document. This presumption applies even when the signee is illiterate or the document is in a language foreign to him. Here, the documents were indeed written in languages the investors may not understand, but at the same time the investors were given the opportunity to understand the nature of the engagement and the content of the documents they signed. Moreover, these are not trivial agreements that are made frequently without the signee paying much attention to their exact content. Rather this was a transaction where considerable sums of money were transferred for the purpose of investing in a foreign company on a distant country, and therefore the contracting parties have a basic responsibility and obligation to understand the nature of the transaction. Hence, the investors cannot simply waive their contractual obligations even if the agreements were written in a language they do not understand.