New Delhi: Appeal in Singapore, equal to the Supreme Court of India, has upheld the invalid of a mediated award given by a three-member tribunal headed by former Chief Justice of India Deepak Mishra, after finding out that 47 percent of its content was two related, but different arbitration proceedings.
The other two intermediaries were conquered and fixed by the Tribunal headed by Justice Mishra. However, in parallel mediation, co-arbitrator were different from those who were sitting with Justice Mishra who went to the Singapore Court of Appeal.
A bench by Chief Justice Sundresh Menon and Steven Chong noticed that 212 out of 451 paragraphs were copied with other arbitrations and the approach was in violation of natural justice, with many implications.
To use the previous awards, the templates created a strong presence of bias and bias, the court said that comprehensive copying promoted suspicion that the Tribunal did not actually consider the unique aspects of the current case to be on its ability.
The case was related to a special objective in India in a dispute between vehicle freight corridors and a dispute between a union of three companies involved in infrastructure projects. The Consortium was awarded the tender in August 2015 following a contract between the two sides. The agreement included a section that nominated Singapore as a seat of mediation.
Differences were revealed in the notification of a 2017 Government of India, which increased the minimum wage payable to those working in India. The dispute was whether the Consortium deserves additional payment under his contract.
When the parties failed to reach a cordial resolution, the matter went into mediation in Singapore under the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) rules. The Consortium started arbitration in December 2021.
Former Chief Justice High Court of Madhya Pradesh Krishna Kumar Lahoti and former Chief Justice of Jammu and Kashmir High Court Justice Geeta Mittal were nominated by both parties as an intermediary. He in turn appointed Justice Mishra as the President of the Tribunal. In November 2023, the Tribunal ruled in favor of the Consortium.
The award was challenged before the High Court of Singapore, the Tribunal had copied Justice Mishra on a large scale from the former awards incorporated as the presiding media. The High Court accepted arguments and separated the award. It is believed that the tribunal failed to make an independent evaluation as some parts referred to the submissions in pre -arbitration and not in the present. This, it concluded, showed prejudice, as the Tribunal had trusted the old mediator prizes instead of considering the matter.
Agreed with the High Court’s decision, the appeal court saw: “It is not just a case where there was no possibility of not only the points or conclusions taken in different action, but the parts of parallel awards were re -introduced in the award, even adjusting for differences in the arguments made unnecessarily.,
Copying the previous awards raised appropriate doubts that the Tribunal “did not really accept the unique aspects of the case on its merit,” the appeal said, “The court’s integrity was compromised”.
By drawing from previous awards, the tribunal denied a fair hearing in the current case as the parties had no access to the materials referred to in the decision.
“That material made such a wider part of the award that it could not only be ignored. It was clear that it was neither contemplated nor the parties agreed that the award could be prepared by such a process. For these reasons, we again agree with the judge that the fair hearing was violated,” the court said.
Since the President was a common factor in the present and earlier tribunals, the court said that Justice Mishra was the only mediator who had knowledge of parallel arbitration, and it kept co-arbitrators in an uneven state, compromised the process of decision-making.
The uneven reach of information reduced the fundamental expectation that all intermediaries would have the same ability to affect the result of arbitration proceedings. This, the court held, has damaged the integrity of the arbitration process.
(Edited by Geetanjali Das)
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