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If you have received a GAFTA notice of arbitration, the time for appointing an arbitrator is already running: nine days from the date the email was sent, weekends included, and the claimant does not need to serve a detailed claim first. Below is what to check in the first week so that you neither lose your own arbitrator nor forfeit objections that cannot be raised later.
GAFTA notice of arbitration: what exactly have you received?
A letter demanding payment and threatening to “go to GAFTA” is not yet an arbitration. The arbitration begins with a notice of arbitration — the communication by which your counterparty declares that it is referring the dispute to arbitration under GAFTA Rules No. 125. There will be no separate summons from London: the Rules allow notices by ordinary email, and it is often two paragraphs from the counterparty’s lawyer or broker with no attachments at all.
Three things in that email matter. First, has the claimant named its arbitrator, or is it asking you to agree to a sole arbitrator to be appointed by GAFTA? That determines which response you owe within nine days. Second, are the claim submissions attached — the claimant’s full case with its calculation and evidence? If not, that is no reason to wait: the appointment of arbitrators and the defence on the merits are separate stages with separate deadlines. Third, to which address and to whom was the email sent? Time runs from despatch, not from the moment a director read it.
Keep the original email in full — attachments, sender and recipient addresses, date and time. If a broker or an employee forwarded it, ask for the original: the date of forwarding is irrelevant to the deadline.
Then find the contract with its addenda and the correspondence in which it was concluded, and check the arbitration clause: GAFTA 125, or the expedited GAFTA 126 procedure? Rules No. 125 apply in the edition current at the date of the contract. For contracts dated before 1 July 2026 that is the July 2024 edition or the October 2025 edition — the numbering of the rules discussed below is the same in both; for contracts dated from 1 July 2026 it is the 2026 edition, in which some rules have been renumbered. Rule numbers below follow the 2024–2025 editions, with the 2026 number in brackets where it differs.
How long do you have to appoint an arbitrator?
Nine consecutive days after service of the notice — Rules 3.1(b) and 3.2(b). These are calendar days: weekends and public holidays count. The date of despatch is deemed the date of service (Rule 21.1; Rule 19.1 in the 2026 edition), and the day of despatch itself does not count (Rule 21.3 / 19.3). A notice sent on 1 October requires a response no later than 10 October.
What exactly you must do within those days depends on the email:
- The claimant has named its arbitrator — you appoint a second arbitrator and serve notice of his name on the claimant. GAFTA will later appoint the third arbitrator, who chairs the tribunal.
- The claimant asks you to agree to a sole arbitrator — you either agree, or appoint your own arbitrator and notify the claimant. The claimant then has its own nine days to appoint the second.
Replying “we object to a sole arbitrator” without appointing your own arbitrator achieves nothing: under Rules 3.1(c) and 3.3 GAFTA then appoints a sole arbitrator itself, just as it does if you stay silent. If, in the first scenario, you fail to appoint a second arbitrator in time, the claimant may ask GAFTA to appoint one on your behalf. When it makes sense to agree to a sole arbitrator and when to insist on three, I discuss in GAFTA: tribunal or sole arbitrator?.
There are two traps in this deadline. The first is the broker. Under Rule 21.1 (19.1), service on the brokers or agents named in the contract is deemed proper service on you, and that provision overrides anything in the contract itself. The nine days started when the notice was sent to the broker, even if the broker forwarded it a week later. The second is the arbitrator. He must be a GAFTA Qualified Arbitrator with no interest in the transaction (Rule 3.7), and you need his consent before naming him to the claimant. Forwarding the email to a specialist you know with a request to “look into it” is not an appointment. And the arbitrator you appoint is not your advocate: he must remain independent, and the defence is prepared by your representative.
If by your calculation the deadline has already passed, check which appointments have been made and whether the claimant has applied to GAFTA. Missing the appointment deadline does not decide the dispute against you, but it costs you a say in the composition of the tribunal, and there is nothing left to postpone. The overall course of the proceedings from notice to award is set out in my guide to GAFTA arbitration.
If the clock is already running, send me the notice and the contract — we will start with the next step due.
The email went to spam: can you say you were never notified?
That is a point to investigate, not a reason to relax. The case of African Distribution Company SARL v AASTAR Trading Pte Ltd [2025] EWHC 2428 (Comm) shows why. An Ivorian buyer of Indian rice ignored a Singaporean seller’s letter before claim for almost EUR 1.9 million and USD 299,000. In July 2023 the seller’s lawyers emailed a notice of arbitration to two of the buyer’s generic addresses — the ones the buyer itself had used for correspondence about payments and quality. Twenty-six further emails followed as the arbitration progressed. The buyer answered none of them, GAFTA appointed a sole arbitrator, and in February 2024 he made an award in the seller’s favour. The buyer learned of the award in July 2024, when enforcement began in Côte d’Ivoire.
The buyer’s explanation was that it had never seen the emails — perhaps a spam filter had caught them. The English court refused it an extension of time to challenge the award under sections 67 and 68 of the Arbitration Act 1996: five months of delay, and the judge considered the service argument merely arguable. What remained was to seek a declaration under section 72(1) that the tribunal had no jurisdiction — after the award, and in parallel with its enforcement. The judge drew a line between receiving an email and reading it: a notice that arrives at an appropriate address and is mistaken for spam has still been served, just like a claim form posted to a firm of solicitors which accidentally throws it away. Whether the address was appropriate and whether the emails actually arrived are questions of fact, decided on the evidence.
So if the email turned up in a spam folder or reached the wrong employee, the task is not to convince yourself that there was no service but to pin down the facts: which address the claimant used, who gave it to the counterparty and when, what the company itself used it for, and what the contract says. Preserve not only the correspondence but the mail system’s delivery data. Do not delete the disputed email and do not settle for a screenshot of its header. If the notice went to a former employee or to a broker, reconstruct the whole chain before asserting that service was defective.
What to check before answering on the merits?
In a first reply, the temptation is to explain straight away why the counterparty is wrong. Two questions come first, and either can end the case without any argument about quality or damages: is a GAFTA tribunal entitled to hear this claim at all, and did the claimant bring it in time? Both objections are lost if raised too late.
Is there a basis to challenge jurisdiction?
Jurisdiction is the tribunal’s authority to decide the dispute, and it exists only if the parties made an arbitration agreement. Check whether the arbitration clause became part of the contract, how the terms were agreed through the broker, and whether the people in the correspondence had authority. The absence of your signature on a copy of the contract decides nothing by itself: an arbitration agreement can follow from the whole exchange of messages about the deal.
Appointing your own arbitrator does not deprive you of the right to object to jurisdiction — section 31 of the Arbitration Act 1996 says so expressly. But the objection must be raised no later than your first step to contest the merits: together with, or before, your defence on the merits — not after you have already argued about quality and damages. A party who takes part in the proceedings and stays silent about a defect it knew of or should have discovered loses the right to rely on it later under section 73.
The stock phrase “all rights reserved” will not save you here: the ground of objection must be formulated and raised before the full defence. Staying out of the arbitration altogether is also a decision, but it must be a deliberate one: it does not stop the proceedings, and what follows is what happened in ADC v AASTAR — an award on the claimant’s documents and an argument about the tribunal’s jurisdiction at the enforcement stage.
Was the claim brought in time?
Compare the contract dates, the shipping documents and the date of the notice. For most disputes about the sale of goods the limit is one year from a date that depends on the delivery basis. How that period is calculated, and how a time-bar objection once disposed of a claim against my client, is in my article on time limits for GAFTA and FOSFA arbitration.
The objection has to be raised in the arbitration itself. Under Rule 2.3 (2.2) an award cannot later be questioned for the claim being out of time if the respondent did not raise the point in its submissions. Nor does a missed time limit end the case automatically: under Rule 23 (21) the tribunal may admit a late claim if the circumstances were outside the reasonable contemplation of the parties when they contracted and it would be just to extend time, or if one party’s conduct makes it unjust to hold the other to the strict terms of the time limit. So the objection must not only be raised but argued — and you should expect the claimant to ask the tribunal to exercise that discretion.
Which documents do you need for the defence?
For a first assessment, assemble a working bundle:
- The notice and every subsequent letter — with attachments, dates of despatch and the deadlines they mention.
- The contract, its addenda and the correspondence in which the terms were agreed — including the broker’s messages and any changes to delivery or payment terms.
- The documents on the disputed performance — bills of lading, vessel nominations, invoices, payment records, notices of default or termination; in a quality dispute, certificates, surveyors’ reports and the sampling records.
- The claimant’s calculation of its claim and the documents supporting your own claims, if any.
Keep the correspondence chains complete, including the messages that are inconvenient for you: the claimant will attach them anyway, and out of context they look worse. In parallel, draw up a one-page chronology: what each party had to do under the contract, what actually happened and which document proves it. Gaps become visible at once, and some can still be closed with a request to the bank, the carrier, the surveyor or the broker.
The defence is tested on two levels: is there liability, and is the figure right? Even a proven breach does not make the claimant’s calculation correct. In GAFTA contracts damages for default are tied to the date of default and the market value of the goods, and the arguments are about that date, about whether the substitute transaction — the purchase or sale made in place of the one that failed — matches the contract terms, about the market data and about whether the expenses claimed were actually caused by the breach. How that calculation is built is in my article on calculating damages under English law and GAFTA/FOSFA contracts.
If your company has suffered losses of its own, tell your representative at once. Whether they are framed as an objection to the amount, as a set-off (your debt reduced by what you are owed) or as a separate counterclaim in the same arbitration determines both the procedural steps and the deadlines. Do not assume that the other side’s claim automatically preserves yours: a counterclaim has its own time limits and its own procedure.
Can you negotiate and put the defence on hold?
Negotiations do not stop an arbitration. An offer to discuss a discount or a payment schedule affects neither the nine days for appointing an arbitrator nor the timetable for submissions — until the parties have agreed in writing which deadlines move and by how long, and, for a timetable set by the tribunal, have obtained its ruling. The same goes for a request for more time to prepare the defence: it is made in advance, before the deadline expires, and you make sure the extension has actually been granted. Without your defence the tribunal will decide on the claimant’s documents.
In settlement correspondence, watch what the company admits. “We are prepared to pay half because we do not owe the rest” and “we offer half by way of compromise without admission of liability” are different letters, and the second should be marked without prejudice. What that marking does and does not achieve is explained in my article on without prejudice and subject to contract.
The decision — to defend, to settle or to do both — rests on three things: a preliminary assessment of the evidence, the range of possible liability, and the budget for the arbitration, including the question of how legal costs are recovered in GAFTA arbitration. With that assessment in hand, negotiations are conducted on substance while the company’s procedural position stays intact.
If you have received a GAFTA notice of arbitration, send me the email with all its attachments and the contract, and tell me the amount claimed and the nearest deadline you know of. I will identify the immediate steps, assess the grounds of defence and the scope of the work.
