Singapore Supreme Court sets aside ‘copied and pasted’ arbitral award presided by former CJI Dipak Misra

“Out of the 451 paragraphs in the Award, it was undisputed that at least 212 paragraphs were copied and pasted from the Parallel Awards,” the ruling noted. Parallel Awards is an anonymised reference to two Indian arbitrations that were held parallel to the Singapore arbitration involving the same parties.

The Court of Appeal is the highest Court in Singapore and is headed by Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon.

The dispute, the ruling noted, involved a special purpose vehicle set up to manage a network of Dedicated Freight Corridors in India, and a consortium of three companies which was awarded a tender in 2014 to manage the western Dedicated Freight Corridor.

Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India (DFCCIL) is a Special Purpose Vehicle set up under the administrative control of the Ministry of Railways to undertake planning and development, mobilisation of financial resources and construction, maintenance and operation of the Dedicated Freight Corridors.

The arbitration began in December 2021.

“These issues fell to be determined by a tribunal of three arbitrators, who were all eminent retired Indian judges. The Honourable Justice Krishn Kumar Lahoti, former Chief Justice of the Madhya Pradesh High Court, and The Honourable Justice Gita Mittal, former Chief Justice of the Jammu & Kashmir High Court (together, the “co-arbitrators”), were nominated as arbitrators by the appellants and the respondent, respectively. The Honourable Justice Dipak Misra, a former Chief Justice of India, was nominated as president of the Tribunal by his co-arbitrators (the “President”),” the ruling noted.

The Indian Express contacted former CJI Misra, but he was unavailable for comment.

It is rare for a court, while hearing such an appeal, to name the arbitrators.

In 2024, the Singapore International Commercial Court (SICC) first heard the appeal against the international award and set it aside, but did not name the arbitrators involved.

“With regret, I conclude that the assertion of apparent bias against Judge C, a highly experienced judge and arbitrator, is well-founded,” the SICC had said, referring to Justice Misra. The SICC accepted the consortium’s argument that Justice Misra’s use of content from the Parallel awards amounted to “pre-judging a case and that the accumulated knowledge of Judge C and his willingness to use that knowledge in preparing the Award constitutes impermissible pre-judging”.

The Indian entity, the SPV, is learnt to have argued before the Court of Appeal that since the Parallel Awards had no material impact on the outcome of the international arbitration, procedural fairness was therefore not compromised in any meaningful way.