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- UNITED KINGDOM 128
UNITED KINGDOM 128
United Kingdom Supreme Court, 18 September 2024, Case No. [2024] UKSC 30
(RusChem Alliance LLC v. UniCredit Bank GmbH)
UNITED KINGDOM 128
The Supreme Court upheld the Court of Appeal’s anti-suit injunction ordering RusChem to cease the court proceedings it had commenced in Russia against UniCredit, finding that the parties had agreed in their bonds that any disputes be settled by arbitration seated in Paris. The Court found that the governing law clause in the parties’ bonds, which provided for the application of English law, was sufficiently broad to also apply to the arbitration clauses therein. It was irrelevant that the seat of the arbitration was Paris and that French law treats arbitration agreement as governed by the law of the seat. In UNITED KINGDOM 131, the Court of Appeal granted UniCredit's application to revoke or vary the anti-suit injunction.
The court discusses whether referral of the resolution of disputes to arbitration is mandatory under the Convention and whether mandatory referral is an internationally uniform rule which supersedes municipal law.
The court discusses which law – lex fori, lex contractus, law of the State where the award will be made – applies specifically to determining whether an agreement to arbitrate is “null and void etc.“, and, by extension, which law applies to determining the validity of arbitration agreements.
Related court proceedings: The court discusses measures in aid of arbitration (e.g., anti-suit injunction). This topic also includes the issue of the relationship between the Convention and the recognition of a foreign judgment on the validity of the arbitration agreement.