Summary

Reproduced from www.worldbank.org/icsid with permission of ICSID. (Document, does not apply to summary and/or TDM IACL Case Report below).

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Case report (free download)

Case Report by Ilektra Athanasiou-Ioannou, Editor Ignacio Torterola

Summary

In the Decision rendered on September 29, 2016, an ICSID ad hoc Committee dismissed Slovak Poštová Banka A.S.'s request for partial annulment of an arbitration award issued on April 9, 2015. In the aforementioned award, the ICSID Tribunal had unanimously dismissed the Slovak Bank's claims due to lack of jurisdiction over the claims against the Hellenic Republic; in particular, according to the Tribunal, Poštová Banka's Greek Government Bonds did not qualify as "investments" protected under the 1991 Slovakia-Greece bilateral investment treaty. In the award, declining jurisdiction, the Tribunal had also ruled that Istrokapital SE - a Cypriot company, shareholder of Poštová Banka and one of the two original claimants in the ICSID claim against Greece- did not have itself an investment, thus it did not have standing as an investor under the 1992 Cyprus-Greece bilateral investment treaty. Poštová Banka's request was brought under Articles 48(3) and 52(1)(e) of the ICSID Convention . The Committee, however, rejected the argument that ICSID's Tribunal had not properly explained its reasoning; specifically, the Committee ruled that i) it had no difficulty in following the Tribunal's reasoning in the award and that ii) the Tribunal's reasoning was not contradictory.

Main issues

Annulment - ICSID Convention: annulment grounds - Failure to state reasons; the legal standard - Narrow scope of annulment grounds - Jurisdiction ratione materiae; definition of "investment".

Poštová banka AS and ISTROKAPITAL SE v Hellenic Republic - ICSID Case No. ARB/13/8 - Annulment Proceeding - Decision on Annulment - 29 September 2016

Case report provided by International Arbitration Case Law (IACL)