Article by Angela Jameson, Industrial Correspondent

FIRST it “mislaid� 14 million of them. Now Brambles, the accident-prone support services company, has lost an unpalatable custody battle in the US after a wood recycling firm caught hoarding 30,000 of the company’s trademark blue storage pallets refused to give them back.

To add insult to injury, a US court has awarded Mock Pallets, of Georgia, a $500,000 (£280,000) windfall for “looking after� the disputed storage platforms for a decade.

Last year Brambles began a worldwide hunt for missing pallets after an internal investigation revealed that it had lost millions of the platforms, used by delivery companies the world over.

When Chep USA, the group’s American arm, found 30,000 of them at warehouses belonging to Mock, executives demanded their return through the US courts. In a counter-claim Mock argued that it was owed compensation for storing the pallets under Georgia’s obscure “naked depository law�.

In the judgment Brambles has been ordered to pay Mock $19.50 for each pallet � about the cost of making an entirely new pallet and almost four times the “going rate� for returning discarded platforms to their owners. Analysts say the verdict could add £6.8 million a year to Brambles’ costs.

Brambles first disclosed problems with its business model in 2002. In February, the Anglo-Australian group made a further admission that about 2.5 million pallets in its Chep USA business had gone missing during the past 18 months, leading to an unexpected charge to interim profits of £11 million.

A spokesman for Brambles, which is planning to appeal against the ruling, played down implications of the Mock case, saying that the group was continuing to work with the pallet recyling businesses to recover its assets.