Delivered the cargo and not been paid? Start here

The stated reason is usually quality. The real reason is usually something else, and knowing which changes what you should do next.

Meanwhile the cargo is deteriorating and demurrage accrues daily. In physical trade the standoff itself is expensive, which is exactly the pressure a mediator uses to get a deal.

• Establish the facts both sides can agree on. Usually far more than either expects. We work from the contract, the load and discharge analyses, the sampling records and the documents rather than from what anyone is feeling.
• Get an independent measurement where the numbers are the issue. We instruct recognised inspection companies and laboratories, on terms both sides accept in advance, so the result binds rather than starts a new argument. Retained sealed samples from load are usually the key.
• Value the parcel honestly. This is where a broker beats a lawyer. We know what off-specification material is genuinely worth and where else it can go, so a discount can be argued from a real number rather than from leverage. See off-spec and distressed cargoes.
• Find the landing zone and put it in writing. A price adjustment, a replacement parcel, a split of the demurrage, a resale to a third buyer at a shared loss. Almost every one of these ends in a commercial number rather than a legal ruling.
• Tell you when we are the wrong answer. If the counterparty is insolvent, if there is fraud, or if the amounts justify formal proceedings, you need a lawyer and you need one now. We will say so on the first call.

By the time payment has stopped, the two sides have usually written each other several e-mails they cannot take back. Positions harden, and every further message is read as a threat. That is a communication problem more than a commercial one.

A neutral party changes the mechanics. Each side can say what they would really accept without conceding it publicly. We can carry a number between them and test it without either party losing face for having floated it. And because we are paid to conclude rather than to be right, our incentive points at a settlement instead of at a verdict.

• We take no position and no title. We are a broker: we never own the cargo, so we have nothing riding on which way it goes.
• Both sides can appoint us. We work for sellers, for buyers, and occasionally for both jointly where they want one process rather than two.
• It is confidential. Nothing said in the process goes further, which is the whole reason people can be honest in it.
• It is fast and it is cheap next to the alternative. Formal proceedings run in months and cost real money, and note that under GAFTA terms you normally cannot recover your legal costs even when you win, while FOSFA allows it. Either way, a commercial settlement in two weeks usually beats a ruling in eight months.

Before anyone argues about the cargo, find out which regime governs it. It decides the deadline, the procedure and whether you can recover your costs, and those differ enough to change what you should do.

Note what all three have in common: they are built by traders for traders, and they keep lawyers out of the room where they can. That tells you something about how these disputes are meant to be settled, and it is the same instinct behind bringing in a broker rather than a firm.

We work in waste-based feedstocks, renewable fuels and recycled polymers, and that is where our technical judgement is strongest: we can tell you what a chlorine number or an FFA result actually means for value.

The mechanics of a stalled cargo, though, are the same in any physical commodity: a specification argument, a document problem, a market that moved, and demurrage running while nobody moves. Where the dispute is commercial rather than technical, we can help outside our own products too. If your situation needs specialist technical knowledge we do not have, we will say so rather than learn on your cargo.