Mary Nour ready to sail from Altamira port

Mexican cement importer Comercio para el Desarrollo Mexicano (CDM) has arranged for a US$1.6mn counter guarantee to take its embargoed 26,000t cement shipment out of Altamira port, CDM partner Ricardo Alessio told BNamericas. CDM's Jordanian partner CTI Group will put up most of the funds, he said while expanding on local press reports, and CTI has also found a buyer for the Russian-made cement brought into Mexico on the Panamanian-flagged Mary Nour silo ship. "While we don't yet know exactly where the cement will go, I can say that it won't be anywhere near Mexico such as the US - it will go to a European or African country on the Atlantic coast," he said. Moving the cement shipment into another country does not mean that CDM's legal procedures against port authorities will be held back, he added, "but the lack of a deadline for rulings on these legal processes are what put us at risk - the decisions may come in a week and they may come in six months, and we cannot risk waiting that long as the cement quality may be compromised in that amount of time." CDM has had the shipment impounded since July last year when it tried to bring the cement into the country on Mexico's east coast, after competitors filed injunctions against the importation, saying it lacked proper documentation. Since then CDM has racked up 11.2mn pesos (US$1mn) in fines. The competitors include national cement chamber Canacem - representing the world's third largest cement company, Mexico's Cemex (NYSE: CX) and the local unit of the second largest cement maker, Swiss company Holcim. While in the past CDM has said it would try once again to bring more cement into Mexico, "the whole process has left us in a weak position to find new partners, and so the project will be kept on standby for now," Alessio said. Mexico accepts some 100,000t/y of foreign cement - much of which comes from the US - for its 33Mt/y market. Of the total market consumption, Cemex controls about 50% of sales.