Every answer and its explanation appears here once you have finished the path. Each one then links to the matching glossary entry, where the concept is set out in full with its worked example.
1. A state-owned energy company does not pay. What decides which policy responds?
The cause of the default: badly run and insolvent, it is an ordinary credit risk; barred from paying by its supervising ministry, it is a political risk
The debtor is the same in both cases, and the responding cover is not: that is the module's reversal, and it is counterintuitive because the debtor's status is the first thing you see in a file. Relying on that status leads to notifying under the wrong policy, and a notification made under the wrong policy is not simply redirected: it is late under the right one, the clock having run while the matter was handled elsewhere. Amount and currency decide placement and limit, never the trigger.
Glossary entry · risque-politique2. How is commercial default proved, and why is proving sovereign non-payment of a different nature?
Commercial default is proved by documents that exist, a judgment, a schedule, a demand letter; sovereign non-payment requires establishing a cause living in a decision the state has no interest in publishing
Credit insurance requires establishing an inability to pay, which is a documented fact; political risk requires establishing a cause, and that is work of an entirely different difficulty. The gap is not one of degree but of kind, and it governs how the file is run long before any loss. The answer presuming both at the end of the waiting period confuses the constitutive delay, which opens the right to notify, with the proof, which remains to be made afterward. The one satisfied by the debtor's public status repeats the previous question's error in another form.
Glossary entry · assurance-credit-export3. Three situations are regularly conflated under sovereign non-payment. One of them is not one. Which, and what does it fall under?
The buyer that paid in local currency without the funds being able to leave the country; that falls under non-transfer, with its own trigger and its own waiting period
In that third case the buyer has paid, so there is no unpaid invoice to establish: the difficulty is downstream, on getting the funds out, and it carries a distinct trigger and its own waiting period. Notifying a non-transfer as a non-payment runs the wrong clock on the wrong cover, and that is the kind of error you do not recover from. The first two situations are indeed sovereign non-payments, one by an administrative act aimed at a debtor, the other by a moratorium striking all creditors at once, and filing them elsewhere removes from political risk exactly what lies at its heart.
Glossary entry · inconvertibilite-devises4. The debtor invokes a cash difficulty and will never say it is barred from paying. Which piece of evidence is worth more than all the others?
What the debtor kept paying, to whom, and on what date: a buyer settling its local suppliers and ceasing to settle its foreign ones is not short of money, it is following an instruction
Proof is built as a bundle, and that bundle is assembled during the events rather than two years later: the date of a circular, the fate of the same buyer's other foreign suppliers, the central bank's currency allocation notices, published accounts. One element dominates, comparative payment behavior, because it shows selection where the debtor alleges scarcity. Waiting for a statement from the debtor means asking it to admit to all its suppliers that it will pay nobody, which would immediately cost it its supplies: it is the document you will never get, and waiting for it wastes the time when the others could still be gathered.
Glossary entry · risque-politique5. The module ends on a reversal of the order in which one believes the work is done. Which?
Classification happens at placement, when choosing which cover to buy and over what scope: a file discovering it on the day of notification has already lost what mattered
The documents that would have proved the cause were contemporaneous with the events, and nobody will produce them two years later: that is what makes late classification unrecoverable rather than merely awkward. Placing that moment at the loss or at recovery, as two other answers do, describes what actually happens in the files that are lost, and that is precisely why they are lost. As for the applicable law, it governs the commercial receivable and says nothing about the cover behind it: you can be entirely right about your invoice and have bought neither of the two policies that answered.
Glossary entry · credit-caution