Quite bullish EU sugar market news today: The CXL “Erga Omnes” import quota was oversubscribed by about four times – the allocation coefficient was 28.570644 per cent. There were applications for 911,390 tonnes, but only 260,390 tonnes could be allocated. Bearing in mind that the bank guarantee required to apply for CXL import licenses is 20 €/t, applicants would have had to put in place a total bank guarantee of 18 million euros. However, since customs officials require the full import duty of 339 €/t to guarantee “end use”, i.e. to guarantee that the sugar will actually be refined, the total amount of money that applicants will have had to put at risk to make these applications is about 330 million euros! Of course, the bank guarantees for quantities applied for but scaled back by the allocation coefficient, will be returned in respect of the unsuccessful applications. These applications would only really make sense if refined sugar prices were at least 800 €/t in the refining Member States, excluding finance costs and any margins, and assuming costs from CIF raw to DDP refined is about 150 €/t.