One quarter-century after the Arbitration Act 1996, what’s working and what requires change? In the second part of a series of articles, Ravi Aswani, of 36 Stone, and Valya Georgieva, of Penningtons Manches Cooper, look at the process of challenging an arbitration award on jurisdiction
Some routes of challenge are used more often than others. Aswani and Georgieva focus on the s 67 method, the rehearing option, covering pertinent caselaw as well as criticism from within the arbitration community.
They recount ‘one of the most striking examples of the cost inefficiency of rehearing evidence under s 67’, in which ‘an award of $70m, granted following a week’s evidentiary hearing before the tribunal, was successfully challenged after new documentary and witness evidence was presented to the court, resulting in the court reaching substantially different conclusions than the tribunal’.
