Abstract: For decades, corruption has plagued international society from both a political and economic perspective. Driven by globalization, it is flourishing to such an extent that the rule of law is threatened. Faced with this fact, governments around the world as well as political and judicial institutions have gone on a crusade to fight against this scourge through an important arsenal of international conventions, regulations, codes of conduct and national laws that raise corruption to the status of a common enemy, threatening international public order.
After some jurisprudential procrastination, it seems to be accepted today, at least in internationalcommercial arbitration that the latter, as guardian of justice and privileged actor in the settlement of disputes in the context of international trade, is at the heart of this fight against corruption. International arbitrators, to whom the parties confer the power to render justice, are responsible for re-establishing the rule of law, by ensuring that acts of corruption are not complied.
The task is not easy and the pressure is great. Before arbitrators can rule on the facts before them, they must first determine under which law they should assess allegations of corruption. It is easy to get lost. It is therefore understandable that, being human, the judgment of international arbitrators in the face of allegations of corruption is not infallible.
To remedy this and to ensure that an award validating a contract tainted by corruption does not enter the national legal order, the annulment judge is responsible for checking the awards against the anticorruption norms that are part of this arsenal called international public order. Again, this is not an easy task. The debate on the scope of this control is passionate and has caused much ink to flow.
There seems to be a consensus, at least in France, on the fact that the judge in charge of the annulment, in matters of corruption, should not be satisfied with having blind confidence in the judgment of the arbitrator, especially when the latter rejects the allegations of corruption, but should himself verify, through the so-called “faisceau d’indices” method i.e. a set of concordant items of evidence, the veracity of the allegations of corruption.
The ruling of the Court of Cassation of September 21, 2021 in the famous Alstom saga, which has been followed with interest by the entire arbitration community, is placed in this context. In this decision, the Court of Cassation calls on the Court of Appeal to reconsider its position, accusing it of having distorted one of the pieces of evidence submitted to it. The motivation of the Court of Cassation may seem curious and one might think that this decision could go unnoticed. However, in light of the Court of Appeal’s decisions in this case, important lessons can be drawn concerning the issues and particularities of award review in the presence of allegations of corruption.
Extracto: “Visto la obligación del juez de no distorsionar el documento escrito que se le presenta (…) En este sentido, si bien la transcripción de la audiencia arbitral menciona, en primer lugar, las respuestas de la Sra. [Q.] [G.], durante su interrogatorio por el tribunal arbitral, sobre las condiciones de obtención de documentos confidenciales de los interlocutores chinos identificados por su nombre, en segundo lugar, que sólo se negó a contestar a las solicitudes de los asesores de Alstom ante los servicios anticorrupción británicos a causa del inicio del procedimiento arbitral, y, por último, que el Sr. [V], interrogado por el presidente del tribunal arbitral, declaró incorrecta la afirmación de que los gastos operativos sólo se habían justificado mediante recibos de tarjetas bancarias y que la finalidad y la naturaleza de estos gastos no coincidían con las de los documentos. [V], al ser cuestionado por el presidente del tribunal arbitral, afirmó que era incorrecta la afirmación de que los gastos operativos se justificaban únicamente con los recibos de las tarjetas bancarias y que no se indicaba la finalidad y la naturaleza de dichos gastos, la Corte de Apelación, que distorsionó los términos claros y precisos de dicha transcripción, violó el principio mencionado.”
Iurgium [previously Spain Arbitration Review]