Executive summary. For eight months the world's main oil tanker benchmark priced a voyage that few ships could make and fewer would report. TD3C, the Baltic Exchange rate for a 270,000-tonne cargo from Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia to China, went from $218,000 a day before the war to $1.35 million on October 29, Bloomberg reported. Billions of dollars in derivatives settle on it.

Mercuria Energy is asking London's High Court to declare that every TD3C assessment since early March is invalid and that the index should have been suspended. The trial opened on October 26. Its filings, now public, contain what Mercuria calls evidence that some Baltic staff and most of the rate's panelists doubted the number while publishing it, including a transcript in which the head of benchmark production says that "had TD3 been any other index, we would have suspended." The Baltic says passage stayed possible, its panel remained "willing and able to assess", and Mercuria is a trader with "huge index-linked exposures, which it has failed to risk manage."

Our assessment: the Baltic is more likely than not to win, 60% on our paths, most likely on the narrow ground that its terms or the statute give Mercuria no route to the declaration it wants. Full retroactive voiding of TD3C is a 10% tail. New hedging has been moving to TD34, the Baltic's Gulf of Oman-China route, and the trial record gives every user of TD3C a reason to ask what they are paying against. Desks should treat open TD3C positions and index-linked hire as carrying legal risk into early 2027.