Virgo Receipt Crisis

Background

Each yard held hydrogen in cold-gas vaults and issued two kinds of paper against it. Warrants promised delivery of a fixed quantity on presentation, and custody receipts conveyed title to stored gas. Operating draws were reconciled against metered stock each quarter, while warrant draws were reconciled only on presentation. Each register omitted the other class of draw, so an operating draw appeared in the logs as a delivery to residential provision.

Refusals and audit

The first refusal was at the Corvin Sluice yard in 1.18 billion CE. A warrant holder presenting a warrant for 9,400 tonnes received 6,100 tonnes and a written notice for the balance.

Four more yards refused within eleven months, and the Virgo Warrant Commission ordered an audit of warrants against metered stock. The five yards had 412,000 tonnes of warrants outstanding against 261,000 tonnes of metered stock, a shortfall of 151,000 tonnes that the yards' own power divisions had consumed. The audit form had no line for gas consumed by the issuing yard.

The five yards cut residential deliveries to 70% of their allocation for nineteen months. Maintenance was deferred at four cooling installations, and two permits under cooling rights lapsed. Cooling rights can allocate heat-rejection capacity to radiator flocks, mobile computers that carry their inhabitants between heat-rejection paddocks.

Settlement and custody pools

In 1.18 billion CE the Commission ruled that a refusal notice conveyed no title to any delivery grade. Lenders held 1,240 such notices as collateral, and the ruling reduced those claims to a share of each yard's remaining stock.

A settlement required each yard to place its stored fuel in a custody pool with its own store, seals, register and a keeper appointed by the lenders' committee. Any transfer from a pool to an operating tank needed the keeper's countersignature.

Quarterly counts were made by the Virgo Reserve Inspectorate, whose inspectors held no office at any yard. Its first count, later in 1.18 billion CE, found 2,140 tonnes of gas recorded in the wrong pool's register.

Claims and later accounting

Four of the five yards had affiliates registered outside Virgo, two in Fornax and two in Coma. A written query and answer between Virgo and Fornax took more than 200 million years at light speed, so the lenders' committee sent resident branches with authority to conduct its claims.

The first judgement against an affiliate was delivered in Fornax in 1.31 billion CE. A resident branch sent to conduct that claim later filed a separate claim for its own share of the award, and the court heard both claims together.

In 1.20 billion CE the Virgo Warrant Commission's audit form gained a line for hydrogen consumed by the issuing yard.