Sumeet Malhotra may only just have joined law firm Watson Farley & Williams (WFW) as a partner in its Singapore office, but he is already anticipating a hefty workload.
“My team and I are of the view that the factors which created the challenges of the past year remain in play, and we expect to see further cascading waves of defaults within our industry,” he told TradeWinds.
A specialist in commodities disputes, Malhotra, who joins WFW from Hill Dickinson, said that the choppy market conditions and the overall economic uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 pandemic during 2020 gave rise to “calamitous defaults within the commodities and shipping value chain”.
“We anticipate that much of our time in the coming year will be devoted to assisting our shipping, trading, trade finance and insurance clients in the management of present challenges, and in preparing for continuing uncertainty,” he added.
Malhotra warned in February 2020 that the pandemic would cause chaos on the legal front.
Back then he was fielding calls from clients concerned about whether or not they would be liable for any delays, and whether a global pandemic constituted an event of force majeure.
Malhotra said at the time that ascertaining whether you would be “left holding the baby” would be determined by a number of variables, such as what a company’s role was in the supply chain, the factual matrix of the facts at hand and the contents of contracts.
That is what lawyers are having to resolve today.
“Given the timing of events, the claims cycle is now at a stage where shipping and trade credit underwriters are scrutinizing an unprecedented volume of claims,” Malhotra explained.
Malhotra has nearly 20 years’ experience as a lawyer, with particular expertise in advising industrial and agricultural commodity traders on trade disputes, structured trade finance, trade credit insurance and shipping and charterparty matters.
His legal background includes 13 years working as in-house legal counsel at commodity trading houses, shipowners and ship managers, including Cargill, Noble Group and Bernhard Schulte.
Steven Burkill, WFW’s Asia Pacific dispute resolution group head, said Malhotra’s experience and expertise tallied “perfectly with our strategy of developing our disputes capability in Asia in line with our services into sector strategy, both in our core maritime and energy sectors and also as part of our drive to further grow our mining and commodities practice across the region”.
