Mercuria tanker dispute puts 100 million dollars at stake

Hunter Group says more than 100 million dollars in charter income, losses and interest has accrued in its dispute with Mercuria, whose London lawsuit challenges the Baltic Exchange's TD3C tanker benchmark.

Why it matters: The case will decide whether a benchmark built on broker assessments stayed valid when the route it prices was effectively closed, and billions of dollars of charters and derivatives reference that index.

Data as of Bloomberg report of November 4, 2026, read in full in this run; single-sourced to that dispatch, so evidence is capped at C. Court proceedings in London this week; charter figures are Hunter Group's account.

A London court case over the world’s benchmark oil tanker rate now carries a nine figure private dispute alongside it. Oslo listed Hunter Group says more than 100 million dollars in accrued charter income, losses and interest rides on the outcome of Mercuria Energy Group’s lawsuit against the Baltic Exchange, Bloomberg reported. Hunter chairman Morten Astrup gave the figure in a London interview; Mercuria declined to comment.

Mercuria argues the Baltic Exchange should have suspended the TD3C index, the benchmark rate for shipping crude from the Persian Gulf to China, from early March to July 3, when oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz came to a near standstill after the Iran war broke out. The exchange maintains it was still possible to price the freight risk using broker assessments even while shipments were severely disrupted. The TD3C rate is assessed from the cost of sending a supertanker from Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura to China, and it underpins other charter contracts as well as billions of dollars in derivatives.

Hunter sits on the other side of the trade. It leased the 10 year old tanker DHT Puma from Mercuria at a fixed 52,000 dollars a day and leased it back to Mercuria at a floating rate linked to TD3C, which soared as supertanker lease rates climbed to record highs above 1 million dollars a day during the crisis. Hunter said an unnamed counterparty owed it 67.8 million dollars at the end of September, and its second quarter profit jumped 13 fold to 47 million dollars, with an average time charter margin of 401,172 dollars a day. Its shares have risen 882 percent this year.

This week Mercuria narrowed what it is asking the court for. It no longer seeks a retrospective suspension or restatement of the index and now wants only a declaration that the exchange should not have continued publishing TD3C from March to July. What that change means for Hunter’s arbitration to recover what it says it is owed is not clear, and the ruling will matter well beyond these two firms, because every charter and derivative written on TD3C through the closure period prices off the same contested assessments.

Mercuria tanker dispute puts 100 million dollars at stake

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