Mercuria Sues Baltic Exchange Over Hormuz-Hit Shipping Benchmark
(Bloomberg) -- Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. is suing the Baltic Exchange over the alleged distortion of a key benchmark for the cost of shipping oil from the Middle East.
The commodity trading house has filed a claim in London’s High Court against Baltic Exchange Information Services Ltd., a unit of the exchange that oversees its benchmarks. The case concerns the calculation of the rate to ship oil from the Middle East to China, known as TD3C, according to a copy of the claim form seen by Bloomberg News.
Mercuria says that the alleged distortion has cost it hundreds of millions of dollars.
Spokespeople for the Baltic Exchange, which is owned by Singapore Exchange Ltd., and Mercuria declined to comment.
The 282-year-old Baltic Exchange is a cornerstone of the global shipping industry, publishing rates that help set the price of freight as well as underpinning billions of dollars in derivatives. The war in Iran has thrown the market into chaos, as brokers have struggled to assess the key TD3C rate given that very few ships have been transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
The Baltic Exchange clarified in mid-March that the TD3C rate must continue to be calculated on the basis of shipping from Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura, inside the Persian Gulf, rather than using rates from Middle Eastern ports outside the Gulf, where shipping has continued. The decision shocked traders and brokers and caused rates for the key route to surge to unprecedented levels of more than $600,000 a day, up tenfold from the start of the year.
Mercuria argues that the rate “no longer accurately or reliably represents the underlying market it is intended to measure,” according to the claim form. It didn’t specify an amount claimed in the case, but said that the distortion in TD3C had caused losses to Mercuria and its affiliates that were “estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of US dollars.”
Marco Dunand, Mercuria’s chief executive officer, said last week that the trading company had been able to get ships out through the Strait of Hormuz since the war began, in contrast to some of its rivals. “There’s various ways to do it,” Dunand said at the FT Commodities Global Summit in Lausanne, declining to offer more details.
©2026 Bloomberg L.P.
