Judgment No. SC 24/18 Civil Appeal No. SC 455/16 involved. The court also accepted that the appellant only got involved in supervising the movement of the container from Beira to Mutare at the behest of Mediterranean Shipping. The court further found that although the parties had been involved in these transactions over the years, the respondent did not know that the appellant was merely an agent of Mediterranean Shipping. Having made these findings,that really should have been the end of the matter. The suggestion that, judging by the conduct of the parties, there must have been some other undefined contract between them, is not borne by the evidence. In any event, the court did not state what type of contract this may have been and what its terms were. [30] Of significance is the fact that the respondent itself accepted, in its closing submissions, that its claim was not based on agency but rather on depositum. Having abandoned its claim based on a contract of agency, it was not for the court a quo to find, as it did, that there was some other undefined contract. Once the respondent abandoned its pleadings, the court should have granted absolution from the instance. The attempt by the respondent to rely on the rei vindicatio and depositum, as well as delict, clearly confirms that the respondent had not established any real cause of action against the appellant. DEPOSITUM NOT ESTABLISHED IN ANY EVENT [31] Earlier in this judgment, I cited several decided cases in support of the proposition that pleadings serve the important purpose of identifying the issues that require determination by a court and also enabling a defendant to know the case he has to meet before the court. To this principle however there is a qualification. In a limited sense, 15