A breath of air for Therese Riberanext European Vice-President of Competition and Green Transition. The Spanish government has won two arbitrations in the context of International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID)dependent on the World Bank, for reductions in premiums on renewable energies. For the first time, the ICSID recognizes the predominance of Community law and the lack of jurisdiction of arbitral tribunals to judge investment disputes within the European framework, in the fight for the reduction of renewable energy premiums.
This is the strategy that Ribera is following in its particular fight against international funds that have gone to arbitration to reduce renewable energy premiums – decreed by Mariano Rajoy in 2013 -, and later before the ordinary courts of different countries due to Ribera’s decision not to pay the sums that condemned Spain to pay compensation.
In these awards rendered last Friday, the arbitral tribunals appreciated that They had no skills. to learn more about investment disputes between EU and Spanish investors, the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge reported.
The investors in question were Sapec, a company domiciled in Belgiumand European Solar Farms A/S (ESF), incorporated under the laws of Denmark. This is the first time that ICSID arbitration tribunals assess the lack of jurisdiction to hear purely European investment disputes.
This gives a boost to Ribera’s strategy, which also accumulates defeats in different courts in the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany. In these cases, the decision of the judges was to agree with the plaintiffs’ funds and to authorize the seizure of Spanish assets in these countries.
The new awards indicate that the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) has the meaning defended by Spain and the European Commission, according to which the EU’s participation in the ECT, as a regional organization of interest economic, introduced into its scope the supremacy of European Union law in the field of competences transferred by the Member States to the EU.
The investors are demanding more than 72 million euros in compensation and more than eight million in costs. In the case of Sapec, the amount claimed amounted to 27.4 million plus interest and almost four million costs, and in the case of FSE, the investors requested compensation of 45.1 million plus interest and more than four million fees.
In these proceedings, Spain was represented and defended by the Public Prosecutor’s Office (International Arbitration Department).
The ministry stressed that these two sentences “add to the trend already started by the court constituted according to the rules of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce SCC in the GreenPower case against the Kingdom of Spain, which declared for the first time both the incompetence to hear intra-EU disputes within the framework of the ECT, and closing the debate on the alleged distinctions in treatment between tribunals constituted according to the rules of the ICSID and the rules of the said Chamber.
To date, Spain has also succeeded in overturning three awards in Swedish courts in which arbitral tribunals incorrectly assessed its jurisdiction to hear European investment disputes.
