Specialised advisory

Environmental markets

Taking a carbon project through registration, raising funding against the credits it will issue, and the sustainability work a customer or a lender has started asking for.

If you carry a compliance obligation under the Indian carbon market, the first compliance year’s verified-emissions reports were due on 31 July 2026 — a date that passed is now a question of what a verifier will accept for a year already shut. Most of the projects we are useful to carry no obligation at all: the offset mechanism is open to them, under nine notified methodologies.

Registration has one part that cannot be repaired afterwards. The methodology and the additionality argument can be reworked on paper; the monitoring cannot. Instrument the data before the project operates, or it evidences less than it delivered — and the shortfall surfaces at issuance, years after the spend.

Financing follows those cash flows: the spend is upfront, issuance is years out, and quantity, price and date are all uncertain on the day a lender is asked to underwrite them. What moves a lender is anything that removes one of the three — a forward sale at an agreed price, a first issuance in hand, or the credits as partial support to a facility underwritten on the asset.

Exports advisory

Trade finance, entering a market, and the compliance that decides whether the goods clear at the other end.

The cash cycle stretches by transit time plus whatever credit the buyer negotiated, so a business comfortably funded for domestic sales is short the moment the same volume goes abroad — and it is shortest exactly when orders are growing. The file that wins the facility shows that cycle and the buyer’s credit, not the growth plan.

RoDTEP runs only to 30 September 2026 on a capped allocation, which makes it a budget rather than an entitlement: a late claim risks being scaled back, not merely delayed. File on the shipment, treat confirming the UIN as part of filing, and model the cash flow off Exim Bank disbursal, which has run the payments since 1 April 2026.

On receivables, structure decides the price more than shopping the facility around does. ECGC writes roughly 70% of India’s trade credit insurance and the RBI recognises only ECGC cover for capital relief, so a bank’s appetite for your buyer risk follows the insurer rather than the invoice — which makes cover part of designing the facility, not something added after sanction.

Entering a market is settled by landed cost and by the counterparty rather than by the product — and what the destination requires before the goods may be sold, from testing to labelling, is the cost discovered late, because it can hold a consignment that has already sailed.

For the EU that now includes the buyer’s carbon rules: where embedded emissions are not measured and verified, default values apply, and unmeasured emissions get priced as though they were the worst plausible case. Whether measuring beats the default is the arithmetic to do before the next contract is priced. And the documentation rules change on 1 October 2026, when the RBI’s EXIM guidelines under FEMA come into force.

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