Former Chief Justice of India Justice Dipak Misra. File.
| Photo Credit: PTI
The Singapore Court of Appeal on Tuesday (April 8, 2025) set aside an international arbitral award related to a government railway contract, after finding that substantial portions of the award had been “copied and pasted” from two similar Indian arbitration awards.
Notably, the highest court in Singapore expressly stated that the Presiding Arbitrator in all three arbitrations in question was former Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra. However, the co-arbitrators in the earlier proceedings differed from those who sat alongside him in the case that was brought before the Court of Appeal.
“..the Parallel Awards were used as templates in drafting the Award to a very substantial degree. It is undisputed that at least 212 paragraphs from the Parallel Awards were retained in the 451-paragraph Award. This has several implications”, a bench comprising Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon and Justice Steven Chong observed
The court underscored that by drawing on materials from the parallel arbitrations that the parties had no access to, the tribunal had effectively denied them their right to be heard. It held that such pervasive reliance on “extraneous considerations” constituted a serious violation of the fair hearing rule.
“To the fair-minded and informed observer, it would appear that the Tribunal might not have adequately applied itself to the facts and submissions actually made in the Arbitration. Again, this would cast doubt on the integrity of the decision-making process”, the ruling noted.
However, the judges clarified that they do not impute any bad faith on the arbitral tribunal, but rather intend to safeguard the “integrity and fairness of the arbitral process”.
The dispute
The dispute arose from a contract between a special-purpose vehicle managing freight corridors in India and a consortium of three infrastructure companies. At the heart of the disagreement was whether a 2017 Indian government notification increasing minimum wages entitled the consortium to additional payments under the contract. In December 2021, the consortium initiated arbitration proceedings in Singapore after efforts to amicably resolve the dispute failed.
Former Chief Justice of the Madhya Pradesh High Court K.K. Lahoti and former Chief Justice of the Jammu & Kashmir High Court Gita Mittal were nominated as arbitrators by the respective parties, who jointly appointed former CJI Dipak Misra as the presiding arbitrator. In November 2023, the tribunal ruled in favour of the consortium.
The award was challenged before the Singapore High Court on the ground that the tribunal had extensively copied from earlier arbitral awards, also presided over by Justice Misra. The court set aside the award, holding that the tribunal’s failure to conduct an independent assessment gave rise to a legitimate inference of apparent bias.
Published – April 09, 2025 08:52 pm IST