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Has there been any serous financial analysis of the impact of ALQ's 'manually amended without justification' saga. Although ALS get paid a pittance for their analysis work - the inflated values paid by foreign customers to customers of ALS must be staggering. With coal minors and even majors facing their own significant difficulties (Covid 19, anti-coal environment etc) cheated customers will likely realize that they can not recoup all their damages from the suppliers that cheated them.

ALS referred what started as a fraud by coal minor Terracom to NSW police and now that has blown into an event that potentially threatens the terms of Australian thermal coal industry. Will this impact all Australian thermal coal producers, will they be reuired to agree to discharge port analysis in all future sales agreements? Assuming invoices linked to ALS's 'manual amendments' or fraud to the layperson accounted for a 1% increase in revenues to Australian coal sellers the dollar figure of that fraud is astronomical. Easily the better part of $1 B. If the fraud extended to higher rates (TM decreases of say 2% rather than 1%) or saw customers deceived into taking shipments they would have otherwise rejected the damage could easily exceed the circa. $3B market cap of ALS.

The above figures are calculated as 13,000 cases of fraud, 70,000 mt per shipment (an average but small figure), coal price average of $100 / tonne, gain from fraud 1% of invoice value. While these are assumed figures they are all reasonably derived from information already covered elsewhere. This amounts to $ 0.91 Billion for a 1% average price inflation or $1.92 B for 2%. The figure goes up even more if customers lost the right to reject cargoes - cargoes they would have paid cents in the dollar for. What sort of provision is ALS making for future litigation in their accounts? To date they have not reported anything.