Abstract:
Although much has been said about the treatment of decisions of a seat court pertaining to the validity of an arbitral award by an enforcement court (and vice versa), this issue had not been definitively resolved in Singapore – that is until the recent decision of a five-member coram of the Singapore Court of Appeal in The Republic of India v Deutsche Telekom AG [2024] 1 SLR 56. This article discusses the important conceptual questions that have been answered by the Court of Appeal including the application of the conflict of laws principle of transnational issue estoppel in the arbitration context as well as the existence of the newly-coined “Primacy Principle” as a doctrine of Singapore arbitration law, and the impact of these developments on international arbitration law and practice.