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In Wuhu Ruyi Xinbo Investment Partnership (Ltd Partnership) v European Topsoho Sàrl (2025), an award creditor’s failure to comply with an unless order to produce documents in relation to its enforcement proceedings in the High Court resulted in the dismissal of the enforcement application.

On appeal, the award creditor contended that the High Court, in giving effect to the unless order, was tantamount to fashioning a new and unspecified ground under the New York Convention for refusing enforcement of the foreign award.

In dismissing the appeal, the Court of Appeal held that, consistent with article III of the convention, the process of seeking recognition and enforcement of an award in a court necessarily entails compliance with the rules of procedure of the court. It was therefore well within the High Court’s power to enforce the consequence of a breach of an unless order even where this would lead to the denial of recognition and enforcement of the award.

In Cooperativa Muratori and Cementisti – CMC di Ravenna, Italy v Department of Water Supply & Sewerage Management, Kathmandu and another (2025), the Singapore International Commercial Court (SICC) granted an anti-suit injunction restraining a party from pursuing or continuing proceedings commenced in Nepal to annul an arbitral tribunal’s determination of the proper seat of the arbitration.

The SICC held that, by designating Singapore as the “place of arbitration” in the arbitration agreement, the parties have selected Singapore as the seat of the arbitration and hence chosen the Singapore courts as having exclusive curial jurisdiction in respect of the arbitration.

The SICC emphasised that the conventional comity-driven need for caution in the grant of anti-suit injunctions recedes significantly where the injunction is sought for the purpose of enforcing an arbitration agreement, reinforcing once again Singapore’s pro-arbitration jurisprudence.

Due process challenges

In DJP and others v DJO (2025), the Court of Appeal upheld the SICC’s decision to set aside a Singapore-seated award where the tribunal was found to have copied and pasted a substantial portion from awards rendered in two other parallel New Delhi-seated arbitrations involving the same defendant. The tribunals in all three arbitrations shared the same presiding arbitrator, with different co-arbitrators and incongruent sets of counsel across the arbitrations.

The Court of Appeal held that the integrity of the Singapore-seated arbitration process was compromised as a result of the tribunal’s copy-and-paste from the parallel awards, finding that a fair-minded observer would be left with a reasonable apprehension or suspicion that the tribunal’s decision was improperly influenced by bias or prejudgment.

There was also a breach of the fair hearing rule, as only the presiding arbitrator had access to materials drawn from the parallel arbitrations, which parties in the Singapore-seated arbitration did not have access to.

The court also found that the integrity of the Singapore-seated arbitration was further compromised by a breach of “the expectation of equality” between the arbitrators. The co-arbitrators in the arbitration had no direct access to any material or knowledge derived from the parallel arbitrations, which appeared to have significantly influenced the outcome of the Singapore-seated arbitration.

The stringent standard that must be met before the Singapore courts will allow the setting aside of an award on an infra petita challenge (i.e. a complaint that the tribunal failed to determine all material issues in the arbitration) was emphasised in DKT v DKU (2025). There, the Court of Appeal clarified the framework for analysing infra petita challenges, noting an increasing tendency of disgruntled award debtors abusing this ground of challenge by using it as a pretext to reopen the merits of arbitral awards.

The court emphasised that four conditions must be satisfied in bringing a such a challenge:

1. 1. the point in question must have been properly brought before the tribunal for determination;
   2. the point must have been essential to the resolution of the dispute;
   3. the tribunal must have completely failed to consider the point; and
   4. there must have been real or actual prejudice occasioned by this breach of natural justice.

State immunity and issue estoppel

In Hulley Enterprises Ltd v The Russian Federation (2025), a case arising from the Yukos-related disputes, the Russian Federation sought to set aside a Singapore High Court order granting leave to enforce a final award made against it.

The ground advanced by the Russian Federation was essentially based on the principle of state immunity under section 3(1) of the State Immunity Act, 1979 (SIA). It was contended in that connection that the “arbitration” exception to state immunity in section 11 of the SIA was not engaged, as the Russian Federation had not “agreed in writing to submit” the underlying dispute to arbitration.

The SICC, analysing and following the Court of Appeal’s previous decision in The Republic of India v Deutsche Telekom AG (2024), held that transnational issue estoppel can arise in the context of international commercial arbitration where its effect is to prevent the parties to a prior decision of a seat court from relitigating points again.

It also held that such estoppel may similarly arise in the situation where state immunity is being claimed under the SIA. There was therefore no requirement under the law that a claim of state immunity under the SIA must invariably be reviewed by the Singapore courts on a de novo (from the beginning) basis.

On the facts, the SICC found that there were two prior decisions of the seat court in the Netherlands that did give rise to issue estoppel on matters pertinent to the Russian Federation’s claim of state immunity under the SIA. The SICC accordingly concluded that the Russian Federation was prevented from asserting state immunity under the SIA in challenging the enforcement of the final award in Singapore.

Hulley Enterprises Ltd v The Russian Federation represents a step towards clarifying the applicability of the doctrine of transnational issue estoppel in the scenario where the public international law principle of state (sovereign) im-munity finds intersection with the use of international commercial arbitration in private law.

However, the SICC (per James Allsop IJ’s concurring opinion) left open the question of whether it might be possible that the “public policy” underlying the ius cogens (compelling law) of sovereign immunity should “give one pause for thought as to whether Singapore’s obligation to be satisfied of its authority over a state should be reached by a procedure or principle that allow it to be satisfied of the correct answer to that question, at least where the state contends that it did not agree to the decision-making process of international commercial arbitration”.

This highlights a difficulty in delineating the outer limits of transnational issue estoppel, especially where one finds and regards the issue decided in a foreign seat court (and hence the issue that may give rise to an estoppel) to be of substantive fundamental importance in public international law.

The resolution of this open question in a future appropriate case may well also find the need to reconcile the SICC’s separate holding in Cooperativa Muratori and Cementisti – CMC di Ravenna, Italy v Department of Water Supply & Sewerage Management, Kathmandu and another. There, the SICC held that it was compelled under section 3(2) of the SIA to consider, on its own motion, the issue of state immunity regardless of whether the issue had been raised by any party.

The SICC also observed that the SIA provides for “adjudicative immunity” and “enforcement immunity”, to which separate and distinct exceptions may apply. These are additional considerations that may further compound the complexity of the question left open in Hulley Enterprises Ltd v The Russian Federation.

Through the select arbitration-related jurisprudence reviewed in this article, it can be seen that the Singapore courts continue to enrich and deepen the corpus of legal principles in the field, while also contributing to the development of a transnational rule of law in arbitration. This is a testament to Singapore’s strong and unwavering commitment to continually develop and maintain its status as an arbitration hub of choice in the region.

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