In its judgment rendered today, the Court of Justice has quashed the General Court’s decision having ruled that the European Commission was not competent ratione temporis to assess whether the compensation paid by Romania to the Micula brothers, in implementation of a 2013 ICSID award rendered under the 2002 Sweden-Romania BIT, was constitutive of state…
Looking back on 2021, one realizes that for those interested in the intersection between EU law and investment arbitration, it was a busy year. As part of our customary “year-in-review” series, this post offers a brief overview of the key investment arbitration-related developments in Europe and their coverage on the Blog. I have grouped these…
According to Advocate General Maciej Szpunar, the Micula case is symbolic of the ‘conflictual relationship’ between EU law and international investment law. Indeed, the European Commission has persistently objected to the execution of the ICSID award issued in Micula, not because of the principles of autonomy and mutual trust that underpinned the Achmea judgment, but…
In a decision likely to enthuse investors willing to enforce intra-EU ICSID awards in the UK, the UK Supreme Court unanimously held yesterday that the UK’s enforcement obligations under the ICSID Convention could not be affected by the EU duty of sincere co-operation (in this case, the question of whether the award obtained by the…
After the quite tumultuous 2018, which saw the seminal Achmea judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the subsequent awards on jurisdiction by a number of investment treaty arbitration tribunals, 2019 comes as a sequence and furtherance to developments that were in process in the course of the previous year. The…
Introduction With less than a month to go before the latest EU-UK divorce date, the UK Supreme Court resumed its hearing in Micula et al. v Romania 2018/0177, relating to the enforcement of the widely discussed ICSID award against Romania. With the UK grappling with its future relationship with the EU, it is interesting timing…
In a striking new episode of the long-running Micula saga, the General Court of the CJEU has quashed the European Commission’s 2015 decision that Romania’s payment of the €178 million award rendered by an ICSID tribunal back in 2013 would constitute illegal State aid in the meaning of Article 107 of the TFEU. In its…
Introduction It has by now become amply clear that nothing truly prepares the jurist for an analytical maze run of predicting the effects of Brexit. In some way, it reminds one of “Nebel des Krieges”, the “fog of war” faced by military decision makers once on the battlefield. The best you can hope for is…
