Arbitration Law Monthly

The decision of Sir Michael Burton in Republic of Sierra Leone v SL Mining Ltd [2021] EWHC 286 (Comm); [2022] Lloyd’s Rep Plus 97 is short but nevertheless extremely important. The court has given express recognition to the distinction between the power of a tribunal to hear a claim (jurisdiction) and the exercise of that power (admissibility). The operation of a tiered dispute resolution clause which requires negotiation before the commencement of arbitration was held to fall into the latter category and thus not be amenable to a jurisdictional challenge under section 67 of the Arbitration Act 1996.

The long-running dispute between the Indian Government and Reliance Industries over the exploitation of oil and gas resources off India has reached the English courts for the third time, in Union of India v Reliance Industries Ltd [2022] EWHC 1407 (Comm); [2022] 2 Lloyd’s Rep 201. The judgment of Sir Ross Cranston lays down important principles relating to the relevance of abuse of process in arbitration, confirming that a party who does not raise an issue at the appropriate point in an arbitration will not be able to do so at a later stage in the arbitration by which time the tribunal has made an award inconsistent with the issue raised.

PBO v DONPRO [2021] EWHC 1951 (Comm) is one of those rare cases where the conduct of the arbitral tribunal was such as to trigger the natural justice requirements of sections 33 and 68(2)(a) of the Arbitration Act 1996 and to lead to the remission of the award. In essence the tribunal reached its conclusions in a manner that departed from the cases presented by the parties and exercised a procedural discretion to disallow amendments in a way that led Bryan J to conclude that no reasonable tribunal would have acted.