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# Can you be bound by an arbitration agreement you never signed — simply because you paid the freight?
- URL: https://internationalarbitrationobserver.com/can-you-be-bound-by-an-arbitration-agreement-you-never-signed-simply-because-you-paid-the-freight/
- Published: 2026-10-09T19:19:33.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-09T19:19:33.000Z
- Author: Pierluigi Salvati
- Tags: Enforcement, Commercial Arbitration

In **DZD v DZE \[2026\] SGHC 199**, the Singapore High Court delivered a timely reminder: **commercial conduct may evidence consent, but it cannot simply be made to stand in for it.**

The dispute arose from a demurrage claim. The shipowner obtained an arbitral award against a trader, relying on a charterparty recap bearing what appeared to be the trader’s director’s signature, the company stamp and a handwritten date.

There was a problem: the signature, stamp and date had been electronically pasted into the document. The Court accepted that the recap had not been executed by the trader or with its authority. Yet the shipowner had two further arguments: the trader had paid freight, and it had not participated in the arbitration to dispute jurisdiction. Neither worked.

**First, silence is not necessarily consent.** The Court rejected the argument that the trader’s failure to participate in the arbitration deemed an arbitration agreement to exist under the Singapore’s International Arbitration Act. A party is not obliged to participate in proceedings merely to preserve a jurisdictional objection. More fundamentally, the provision cannot conjure an arbitration agreement into existence where none was ever made.

**Second, payment is not a universal solvent.** Paying freight did not establish that the trader was the charterer. Nor did it demonstrate acceptance of an arbitration clause in a charterparty whose terms the trader had no evidence of knowing.

**Third, ratification has limits.** A forged signature is not merely an unauthorised signature. The distinction matters: an unauthorised act may be capable of ratification; a forged execution, which purports to be genuine rather than to be an agent’s act, cannot be ratified in the same way.

The Court therefore **set aside the award for want of a valid arbitration agreement**, also discharging the associated enforcement order attaching funds in the trader’s bank account.

The wider lesson is not that arbitration agreements require wet-ink signatures, or that payment can never evidence contractual consent. It is more precise. **Consent to the underlying commercial transaction and consent to arbitrate are not interchangeable.** Even if conduct establishes one, it does not automatically establish the other.