On 4 February 2023, Law 5016/2023 (the “2023 Law”), Part A of which is entitled “International Commercial Arbitration”, was published in Greece’s Official Government Gazette (see an unofficial English translation here). Prior to the 2023 Law, Greek-seated international arbitral proceedings were governed by Law 2735/1999 (the “1999 Law”), which was based on the 1985 version…
In a recent judgment of the General Court (the “GC”) in joined cases – T-639/14 RENV, T-352/15 and T-740/17, the question of the clash between EU law (in this case, state aid legislation) and arbitration was discussed. Not surprisingly, from an EU law standpoint, the EU Courts once again found that in case of such…
“I prefer to hope that this shift in perspective will be a chance for people, organisations, businesses, politics, whatever, to put so many of their ongoing disputes and conflicts aside because with this new perspective comes the realisation that these are not worth fighting. It is time to cooperate. May we go through and come…
“the money’s not about the money…The key to settlement lay not in the realm of calculation and rationality but in the more opaque social world of face, punishment, justice and emotion.” Charlie Irvine in Not about the money? The end of 2019 and the start of 2020 offered a rich variety of posts on the…
A recent court judgment confirms enforceability in Greece of a US judgment awarding USD 10 million in punitive damages The Judgment no. 722 of 2019 of the Single Member Civil Court of Piraeus paves the way to a more permissive approach as regards the enforceability of foreign court judgments and arbitral awards on punitive damages…
The concept of attorney-client privilege is a unique creation of common-law jurisdictions which has influenced all types of legal regimes over the world. Common-law regimes developed such a concept to curb the wide sphere of document production and discovery in litigation. As the name of the concept entails, it was created as a privilege for…
It is well known that Greek public finances have been in a precarious state since the country’s debt crisis erupted in 2010. In an environment of tough fiscal consolidation, compensation awards running in millions present a significant economic and political challenge. This post discusses a case before the Greek Supreme Court that resulted in a…
Two recent decisions (nos. 14/2015 and 176/2015) delivered by the Greek Supreme Court analyze the issue of annulling arbitral decisions on public policy grounds. Since arbitration is particularly valuable for the contractual freedom, the general tendency is to restrict the powers of civil courts when they (re)consider and overturn an arbitral award, so that private…
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…
