近日，贸易融资领域国际权威杂志《Global Trade Review》（《全球贸易评论》）发表了一篇题为《How digitalisation could solve commodity finance’s woes, but isn’t》的深度报道。文章指出，针对大宗商品融资贷款领域频发的欺诈事件，虽然，中国、印度、尼日利亚等国家，已在通过数字仓单实践，来化解伪造纸质单据、仓单重复质押等行业顽疾。然而，在全球范围内，数字仓单体系仍未被金融部门当作解决贷款欺诈问题的良方，并分析了其中的原因。
在文章中，记者Eleanor Wragg将66云链“区块链数字仓单平台”的相关理论和实践，作为中国关于破解大宗商品融资难问题的案例予以重点关注。
以下为部分原文，英语原文内容可点此链接阅读，汉语译文内容可点此链接阅读。
The use of fake or duplicated documents to secure multiple commodity finance loans – an issue that crops up with startling regularity – could easily be solved by the implementation of readily-available technology. What’s behind the apparent inertia? Eleanor Wragg reports.
Of the many flavours of deception and dodgy dealings that have emerged in the commodity trading sector of late, documentary fraud is one of the most pernicious. High-profile cases such as the Qingdao imbroglio, the Agritrade collapse and the nickel scandal involving warehousing firm Access World, became ongoing sagas resulting in millions of dollars of losses to financiers, as well as an erosion of trust across the commodity finance sector as a whole – an issue that has only been compounded by the recent flurry of oil traders accused of creating elaborate fake trades to obtain finance.
While the commodities involved differ, each of these fraud cases exploited a key vulnerability: financiers’ reliance on paper documents that can be forged with relative ease. And while industry efforts to digitise one of these documents – the bill of lading (BL) – have been gathering pace for some time, the warehouse receipt, which was at the heart of some of the biggest scams of recent years, has not received the same level of attention. This, says Raj Uttamchandani, executive director at Trade Finance Market, is inexcusable.
“We’ve got the tech available to stop problems like these,” he tells GTR. “You would have thought that the industry would have learnt a lesson after a massive value fraud like that of Qingdao.”
Since 2020, the trade finance fintech has been working with Nigerian commodities exchange Afex on its electronic warehouse receipts system, which farmers and other agricultural producers in the West African country can use to access credit facilities from banks and other lenders on the back of the value of their produce.
“The warehouse receipt is digitised and anyone can check it,” he says.
It is not just in Nigeria where warehouse receipts have been converted into ones and zeroes. In India, the government has been issuing negotiable warehouse receipts in electronic format since 2017 as part of wider plans to bolster the agricultural sector’s access to finance. In China, Sinochem, the country’s fourth largest state-controlled oil company, created in 2020 a blockchain warehouse receipt platform for small and medium enterprises in the petrochemical sector.
Speaking to GTR, a Sinochem spokesperson says: “The credibility of warehousing enterprises and regulators, which are important participants in commodity trade and financing, has been seriously questioned. If banks are to re-enter the inventory-related commodity finance market, we must reconstruct the credit system of inventory-related pledge financing, the core of which is to solve the problem of how to trust warehousing enterprises.”
