The Aviation Working Group (AWG) is currently in the advanced stages of the launch of the ‘CTC Compliance Index’. The CTC Compliance Index will monitor and assess on a predictive basis the compliance of contracting states with the Cape Town Convention and its Aircraft Protocol (CTC) and is set to launch on 29 February 2020.

The aims of the CTC Compliance Index are to provide accurate data and up to date information to the wider aviation financing and leasing community by listing each country’s compliance score with the CTC. Another objective of the CTC Compliance Index is to incentivise further compliance with the CTC.

The AWG has said publically that they hope that this will lead to a positive impact in the provision of aviation credit which will in turn strengthen the air transport and finance sector.

Goals

The goals of the CTC Compliance Index are to:

• Monitor and assess compliance of CTC contracting states

• Provide assessment of future compliance with the CTC

• Incentivise future and continued compliance, and

• Provide objective legal risk assessment which can be used in a transactional context

The AWG have indicated that the information contained in the CTC Compliance Index will be accurate, transparent and updated semi-annually. Its scores are weighted on the assessment of certain variables or categories to include: legal implementation, reported judicial precedent, OECD discounts, governmental communications channels, jurisdictional analysis of legal rules and practices and weighting of select rule of law and political risk indices. The AWG have indicated that they worked with over 200 law firms globally to obtain detailed jurisdictional reports on each CTC contracting state.

The AWG have also noted that each CTC contracting state’s scorecard or assessment will be determined on a non-commercial, non-political, objective assessment of all available data.

The CTC contracting states compliance will be ranked on a four point scale with the best being “very high” and the worst being “low”.

The CTC Compliance Watchlist

The CTC Compliance Watchlist is a supplementary tool that proposes to highlight certain CTC contracting states material developments that may affect its CTC score (positive or negative) and will operate as a caution to users that its stated index score does not reflect such on-going developments.

Once a CTC contracting state is placed on the Watchlist, the AWG proposes to issue bi-weekly reports containing fact based, events driven updates.

The relevant CTC contracting state may be removed from the Watchlist once the AWG has gathered sufficient information to determine the full impact and to re-determine its index score.

Agreement with OECD

There is an agreement amongst the OECD (Aircraft Sector Understanding (ASU) participants) to work with and assess a separate tailored version of the CTC Compliance Index for an 18 month period after its inaugural publication. The tailored CTC Compliance Index will be for the exclusive use of the OECD and will be used in its assessment of CTC contracting states discretionary eligibility for the ASU Cape Town Discount.

Conclusion

The CTC Compliance Index will consist of a limited public index and also a more detailed proprietary index. The public index will reveal final scores of CTC contracting states, and the proprietary index shall contain more detailed information on a per country basis which will be available to AWG members, governments and others, with various paid subscription levels.

The advantage of access and availability of the CTC Compliance Index is that it shall provide a large amount of data and related materials to assist in credit risk assessment and monitoring and be a central resource for the reporting and gathering of information related to CTC compliance globally.

For more information, contact a member of our Aviation & International Asset Finance team.

The content of this article is provided for information purposes only and does not constitute legal or other advice.