The Supreme Court of Singapore has set aside an arbitration award by a tribunal led by the former chief justice of India, Dipak Misra, finding large portions have been copied from parallel arbitrations with only the parties’ names changed.
The award was set aside over concerns of bias, violation of natural justice rules and compromised integrity in the decision-making process. The tribunal included a former high court chief justice and a judge.
This development came in the final decision in , where the court observed that of the 451 paragraphs in the disputed award, at least 212 paragraphs had been retained from parallel awards.
It is crucial to note that the court did not consider the copying itself as the issue. In fact, the court gave several examples of valid copying such as academic references, cases of similar circumstances, etc.
The court was concerned that the arguments presented by the parties were different from the parallel awards and yet the arbitration award was so heavily influenced by them.
In addition, the court stated that the facts in the parallel awards were different from the instance at hand and several of the references in the final award to events or actions of the parties, did not actually exist. This invariably led to the decision to set aside the arbitration award.
