[The following post is contributed by Gunjan Chhabra who a practising advocate currently with Singhania and Partners. She can be reached at [email protected]] The Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Act, 2016 has brought about various new shifts and changes from the previous law. Amongst the various changes made is a very interesting modification which makes certain provisions...
Application of Part I on Arbitration Agreements preceding BALCO
[The following guest post is contributed by Gunjan Chhabra, who is a practicing advocate in various courts of Delhi and is currently working with Rajani, Singhania & Partners. She can be reached at [email protected]] The judgment of the Supreme Court in Bharat Aluminium Co. v. Kaiser Aluminium Technical Services Inc[1] (BALCO) made it abundantly clear that Part I of the Arbitration...
The Supreme Court overrules Bhatia International and Venture Global
The Supreme Court has overruled Bhatia International, and has once and for all held that the supposed omission of the word “only” from section 2(2) has no significance (see below). Importantly, it has also held that a party cannot file a civil suit in relation to the subject matter of the arbitration agreement in order to obtain interim relief. The Court has overruled these decisions...
Fuerst Day Lawson: S. 50 Arbitration Act, and “consolidating legislation”
On Friday, a two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court (Alam and Lodha JJ.) gave judgment in Fuerst Day Lawson v Jindal Exports [hereinafter “FDL”]. The judgment contains a careful and comprehensive examination of a long line of authorities, and an authoritative analysis of two very important issues in arbitration law and civil procedure—whether a Letters Patent Appeal [“LPA”] is maintainable in...
Guest Post: Supreme Court’s View on Substantive and Curial Law in Arbitration
(In the following post, Mr Vijay Kumar, Advocate, Madras High Court and Associate, Iyer & Thomas, discusses the law on implied exclusion) This post analyses few of the significant decisions of the Supreme Court (SC) with reference to the essential difference between the law governing the contract (substantive law) and the law governing the arbitration proceedings between the parties to the...
The Supreme Court Declines an Invitation to Extend Bhatia International
The cases we have discussed on implied exclusion of Part I of the Indian Arbitration Act are composed of three variants – first, the contract designates a foreign proper law but no seat of arbitration (for example Indtel Technical Services v WS Atkins and Citation Infowares v Equinox Corporation), secondly, the contract designates a foreign seat of arbitration but no proper law, and thirdly the...
Res Judicata, Venture Global and s. 48 of the Arbitration Act
It was commonly believed until the well-known decision of the Supreme Court in Venture Global that s. 34 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 did not apply to foreign awards. We have discussed at length the subsequent development of the law on implied exclusion and a challenge to a foreign award. A single judge of the Delhi High Court, in Anita Garg v Glencore, recently considered a...
Dosco India v Doosan: The Sequel to Citation Infowares
One of the more important recent controversies over the Indian Arbitration Act has been the interpretation of the “express or implied exclusion” to the rule in Bhatia International. As is well known, the Supreme Court held in Bhatia International that Part I of the Indian Arbitration Act applies to international commercial arbitrations held outside India, unless it is “expressly or impliedly”...
Parent’s Duty of Care in Relation to a Subsidiary: India and Beyond
[Radhika Ghosh and Yatin Gaur are 3rd year B.A. L.L.B (Hons.) students at Hidayatullah National Law University in Raipur.] The English Supreme Court has yet again in the recent decision of Okpabi v Royal Dutch Shell considered the question of the jurisdictional challenges associated with claims being brought in England against a UK domiciled parent for the actions of its foreign subsidiary. The...
Future-Amazon Case and the Bumpy Road to Emergency Arbitrations in India
[Aakanksha Jadhav and Mustafa Rajkotwala are 3rd year B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) students at NUJS, Kolkata and NALSAR, Hyderabad, respectively] In a significant boost to party autonomy in India, the Delhi High Court explicitly recognised the compatibility of emergency arbitrations with the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 (the ‘Act’) in the recent decision in Future Retail Limited v. Amazon...
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