Our team has been working hard on the new update of our widely-used FIDIC Table of Cases– which can be found here.
With our latest update, we bring you 32 new cases from various jurisdictions around the world, including Vietnam, Kenya, South Africa, Canada, Russia, Paraguay, and Singapore, to mention only a few.
From Vietnam, we have included 13 judgments, the majority of which relate to the 1999 Red and Yellow forms of contract. Most of the judgments concern applications to set aside arbitral awards due to (1) non-compliance with pre-arbitral procedures, and (2) violations of the laws of Vietnam, which are worth noting if you are involved in arbitrations in this region.
In respect of pre-arbitral procedures, the decisions show the Vietnamese courts are inconsistent on the issue of whether or not pre-arbitral steps, such as adjudication and amicable settlement, are to be treated as conditions precedent to arbitration, largely as a result of amendments parties make to Sub-Clause 20. This question is, therefore, assessed on a case-to-case basis. One consistent take away point was that the Vietnamese courts do not treat applications to set aside arbitral awards as re-trials and the merits of the disputes were consistently deemed as irrelevant to the court's decisions.
In South Africa, a number of new judgments came up. We previously reported on the matter between Joint Venture between Aveng (Africa) (Pty) Ltd and Strabag International GmbH v South African National Roads Agency Soc Ltd and Another. This update includes the judgment of the appeal for this matter, during which the Supreme Court of Appeal considered the extent of the autonomy of a performance guarantee and whether or not it can be called upon independently of the underlying contract.
We have been reporting on judgments from Kenya for a while and FIDIC seems to be a commonly used contract in this jurisdiction. The developments have been interesting to follow, as we are sure most users of this table would agree. Six new judgments from the Kenyan courts have been included in this update.
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