In BNA v BNB and another [2019] SGCA 84 (“BNA”), the Singapore Court of Appeal overturned the High Court’s ruling and provided authoritative guidance on the applicable principles in determining the proper law of an arbitration agreement. I discussed the High Court’s decision and the factual background in an earlier post. This post unpacks the…

When a party seeks to challenge the jurisdiction of the arbitral tribunal on the basis of the substantive invalidity of the arbitration agreement, the proper law of the arbitration agreement governs the inquiry. The prevailing approach adopted to determine the proper law of the arbitration agreement is the three-stage choice-of-law analysis set out in Sulamérica…