Commodity trader Mercuria is suing the Baltic Exchange, the world's top provider of benchmark shipping indices, over losses it said were caused by oil tanker pricing data that did not account for the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a court filing showed.
The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, which began on February 28, has left hundreds of ships and 20,000 seafarers stranded inside the Gulf and unable to sail through the vital chokepoints with only a few ships willing to make the voyages daily.
In a court filing dated April 30 and submitted through England's high court, Swiss-headquartered Mercuria - one of the world's top energy and commodity traders - said the Baltic Exchange continued to publish its benchmark crude tanker index, known as TD3C, despite the effective closure of the strait.
The TD3C route is based on voyages from the Gulf to China.
"The result has been ongoing extreme volatility in the pricing of TD3C, which no longer accurately or reliably represents the underlying market it is intended to measure," Mercuria said. Consequently, that had distorted and disrupted shipping and freight derivatives markets that rely on the index.
Freight forward agreements allow investors to take positions on freight rates at a point in the future.
Mercuria, which is a Baltic Exchange subscriber, said the exchange had "breached its aforementioned contractual and/or statutory duties" in part by failing to suspend the benchmark.
As a result, it caused Mercuria and its affiliates losses on physical freight contracts and settled freight derivative contracts benchmarked to TD3C.
While such losses had yet to be quantified, they were "presently estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars," the filing said.
Mercuria declined to comment on Friday.
The London-headquartered Baltic Exchange, owned by Singapore’s SGX, which produces daily benchmark rates and indices that are used across the world to trade and settle freight contracts, declined to comment.
A Baltic member and an active user of the TD3C route, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, said their assessment was the exchange had acted within its benchmark guidelines and regulations and had advised the market on how Middle East Gulf routes would be assessed during the conflict.
The Baltic has launched market consultations since the war began and also offered a back-up route to serve as an alternative benchmark.
(Reuters)