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 foreign state-owned company stops paying a French supplier. What decides whether the unpaid invoice belongs to political risk rather than trade credit?
The cause of the default: mismanagement stays commercial, a ministry order not to pay is political
It is the cause of the default, never the nature of the debtor. A badly run state-owned company that fails to pay is an ordinary credit risk, and the same company forbidden by its supervising ministry from paying a foreign supplier is a political risk. The confusion is expensive because it sends the file to the wrong policy on day one: both covers often sit on the same buyer at the same time, and the one that responds is not the one people call first. The amount qualifies nothing, it only fixes what remains after the guaranteed limit applies, and the supplier's nationality determines which market it can approach, not which fact occurred.
Glossary entry →2. In the worked case, three facts follow one another: in March the central bank suspends FX access for dividends, in June the ministry withdraws the import license and production halts, in September a decree appoints a public administrator. Which fact fixes the triggering event of the creeping expropriation?
June, the moment the subsidiary can no longer operate and the group can no longer fix it
The triggering event of a creeping expropriation is the loss of effective control, and it sits in June: from the license withdrawal onward, operations stop and the group has no remedy left. March concerns cash only and belongs to non-transfer, on a different object. September is the visible culmination, and that is exactly the trap: it is the fact people retain when they look for a formal act, whereas creeping expropriation is defined by the absence of a formal act. December qualifies nothing, a notification does not create a triggering event, it reports one.
Glossary entry →3. Two classifications overlap on one and the same triggering event. What does the non-accumulation clause carried by almost every policy say?
One triggering event opens one indemnity, and the most specific cover applies
The most specific, not the most favorable: that nuance decides whole files, because the most specific cover is often the least generous. The idea that the insured would choose comes from confusion with option clauses found elsewhere, and the idea of stacking within the sum insured comes from the logic of layered covers, which assumes distinct triggering events. Here there is only one. The practical consequence is that arguing for the most lucrative classification is pointless: what gets argued is the one that describes the fact most precisely.
Glossary entry →4. In the same file, dividends have been blocked since March and the plant is lost in June. Does the non-accumulation clause absorb the blocked cash into the expropriation claim?
No: a different triggering event bearing on a different object, so a separate notification, with its own waiting period
Non-accumulation targets ONE triggering event. Here there are two, bearing on two different objects: funds that cannot leave, and an asset that has been lost. These are two claims, with two waiting periods, whose calendars do not coincide. Both affirmative answers rest on a natural shortcut, one file because the crisis is one, whereas the policy reasons by fact and by object. The answer that makes the separation depend on there being two separate contracts is subtler, and fails for a precise reason: non-accumulation operates inside a policy, between its covers, and belonging to one or two contracts changes nothing about the existence of two triggering events.
Glossary entry →5. Creeping expropriation is documented as it unfolds. For an insured who did not do so, what exactly is the consequence at notification?
It can no longer establish a date of loss of effective control, therefore no longer attach its claim to a determinate policy year
What the absence of records destroys is proof of a date, and the date drives the policy year, therefore the terms, limits and exclusions that apply. The answer that makes the cover fall away for misrepresentation is the most tempting because it names a real mechanism: risk disclosure covers circumstances known at inception and aggravations during the contract, not the preservation of evidence of a claim in the making. Non-accumulation, for its part, still applies. And no policy raises a deductible on account of poor documentation. The harm is therefore whole and of another kind: the cover exists, and the insured can no longer say which one.
Glossary entry →