On 17 December 2015, the website of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) announced that the Arbitral Tribunal in the Philip Morris Asia Limited (Hong Kong) v. The Commonwealth of Australia case has issued an Award on Jurisdiction and Admissibility of the case. While the award has not yet been published – pending the redaction…
Investing internationally is all about taking risks. Risk-taking is essential to survive in today’s business world, where competitors, rivals, challengers, in all sectors of the economy, are growing like mushrooms. One needs to take risks to stand out from the rest. Foreign investors are at the center of our economies and appear as key actors…
2015 has witnessed numerous interesting legal developments in the field of international arbitration in Latin America, although these have been wide-ranging in nature and have not always followed the same path. While some jurisdictions have taken legislative steps to introduce or consolidate pro-arbitration legislation in accordance with internationally accepted standards, others, perhaps influenced by negative…
This is Part II of a previous blog, discussing a recent Award dated 27 October 2015 rendered in ICSID Case No. ARB/11/33 – Adel A Hamadi Al Tamimi v. Sultanate of Oman and dismissing all claims against Oman (see Part I of the blog). By way of reminder, the claims brought in these ICSID proceedings…
By a Final Award dated 27 October 2015 (see ICSID Case No. ARB/11/33 – Adel A Hamadi Al Tamimi v. Sultanate of Oman), an international tribunal constituted under the International Convention for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), also commonly referred to as the Washington Convention, dismissed all claims brought by a US national against the…
by Nikos Lavranos, European Federation for Investment Law and Arbitration (EFILA) Whereas all the attention in the TTIP-debate has been focusing on the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions and, more recently, on the proposal of the European Commission for the creation of an investment court system (ICS), the proposed energy chapter – with potentially much…
by Maria Laura Marceddu, School of Law, King’s College London Over the last years, as discussed on this blog (see here), there have been many interesting developments in the field of transparency in investor-State arbitration: the 2006 ICSID amendments, the 2013 UNCITRAL Rules on Transparency in Treaty-based Investor-State Arbitration (“the 2013 UNCITRAL Rules”) (see here), and…
by Sonja Heppner, Trinity College Dublin, School of Law The text of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (‘TPP’) as agreed upon between the United States and Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam on 5 October 2015 provides for public arbitral hearings. The approach taken by the prospective signatories of…
by Juan Carlos Herrera Q. Puente & Asociados In the middle of a short holiday, the Ecuadorian Government anxiously expected the Decision on Annulment issued by the Ad-hoc Committee regarding the investment arbitration initiated by Oxy. On November 2nd, 2015, the ICSID published on its web site the Decision and this event provoked a major…
by Velimir Živković, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Law Imagine that in the heyday of post-Cold War period State A concluded a number of bilateral investment treaties (”BITs”) with a number of countries. Due to a variety of factors, these lay dormant for decades as State A is not exposed to investor…
As Mariel Dimsey has observed, a key challenge posed by investment treaties is that – at the point of ratification – they expose States to arbitrations of ‘as-yet-unknown scope and against as-yet-unknown claimants’. Gus van Harten and Martin Loughlin argue that this feature differentiates investment disputes from those heard in other fora, transforming investment disputes into something akin to ‘domestic judicial review of state conduct’….
In the landscape of international investment arbitration the allegations of corruption have become more and more common. Confronted with investor’s claims before an arbitral tribunal, host states employ all possible legal arguments available to avoid potential liability and the subsequent payment of compensation. Investor’s corrupt acts have emerged as a potentially viable state defense in…
Recently, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and Columbia University professor, warned about the dangers of TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership). “We know we’re going to need regulations to restrict the emissions of carbon,” Stiglitz said. “But under these provisions, corporations can sue the government, including the American government, by the way, so it’s all the governments…
“ISDS” (short for “investor-state dispute settlement”) was a less-known acronym some years back. Now, it has been given an increasingly bad name, no doubt fuelled by Vattenfall’s claim against Germany following the shutting down of its nuclear plants after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, tobacco giant Philip Morris’ high profile claims arising from Australia’s plain-labelling laws,…
Under sec 1 of the RF Law on International Commercial Arbitration 5338-1 of 07.07.1993, disputes arising from civil, including corporate, relationships may be referred to international commercial arbitration, unless otherwise provided by law. However, there is no such restriction provided. In some cases, such as Novolipetsk Still Mill (NLMK) v. Nikolay Maksimov (Decrees of the…
While everyone has been watching with fascination the ups and downs of the Greek crisis, colleagues have been busy in the background trying to unravel some core components of the Greek Bailouts. The PSI deal, which is largely responsible for passing the burden of any potential Greek default from private hands onto public coffers, has…
Co-authored with Maria Laura Marceddu, Italian Association for Arbitration (AIA) The Public Consultations launched by the European Commission in March 2014, and the European Parliament’s recommendations to the Commission on the negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership [TTIP], in July 2015, have revealed a widespread criticism against the traditional investment arbitration system. Mighty…
Part I of this article analyzed the three jurisdictional requirements under the ICSID Convention for submission of counterclaims. Now we turn to three investor-State tribunal decisions decided within the last two years, and how they have contributed to the jurisprudence on counterclaims: Metal-Tech v. Uzbekistan (ICSID Case No. ARB/10/3, Award, 4 October 2013), Al-Warraq v….
In the last two years, three tribunals have enriched the investor-state dispute jurisprudence on counterclaims. Metal-Tech v. Uzbekistan (ICSID Case No. ARB/10/3, Award, 4 October 2013), Al-Warraq v. Indonesia (UNCITRAL, Final Award, 15 December 2014), and Perenco v. Ecuador (ICSID Case No. ARB/08/6, Interim Decision on the Environmental Counterclaim, 11 August 2015) are the relevant…
It is not unusual that a foreign investor is put in a situation where the investment has not been infringed yet and no damage has been caused, but an infringement is very likely to happen. The investor is then often left without any available domestic recourse, which is particularly true as regards general legislative measures….
It comes as no surprise to those familiar with investment treaty law to see the concept of legitimate expectations continuously refined by case law. One of the facets of legitimate expectations, which is most often the topic of intensive debate in the investment treaty arbitration arena, is the analysis of the extent to which representations…
In recent years, Russia has become a frequent respondent in investment treaty matters. This is a new development. There are currently at least ten treaty claims pending against Russia, with a number of other disputes threatened. At the same time, Russia is trying to protect its assets against a large-scale enforcement campaign in Europe and…
Treaty shopping, also called corporate (re-)structuring, is most often associated with legal persons, in particular mailbox companies. Much discussed in this respect is the practice of “round-tripping” where the investor-claimant is foreign-incorporated, but majority-controlled by natural or legal persons of host State nationality (see e.g. Tokios Tokeles v Ukraine, ICSID Case No. ARB/02/18, Decision on…
The Dissenting Opinion of Georges Abi-Saab to the Decision on Jurisdiction and Merits of September 3, 2013 in the case ConocoPhillips, Petrozuata B.V., ConocoPhillips Hamaca B.V. and ConocoPhillips Gulf of Paria B.V. v. Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, ICSID Case No. ARB/07/30 (hereinafter the “Dissenting Opinion”), raises the issue of whether there is a duty to…
