Editor’s Picks: Five Previously Unpublished SCC Awards in the ICCA Awards Series 2026

Five previously unpublished SCC awards have been recently added to the ICCA Awards Series 2026. Together they address a range of questions arisen in Stockholm-seated arbitrations: the arbitrability of claims said to engage foreign mandatory rules, the identification of the law governing the arbitration agreement and the resolution of conflicting arbitration clauses, the enforceability of multi-tier dispute-resolution provisions, the issuance of separate awards for an unpaid share of the advance on costs, and the interaction of international sanctions with contractual payment obligations.

The first award arose from the liquidation of a joint venture for a natural resource project, carried out without one partner’s consent and by means of forged signatures and a forged company seal. Of particular interest is the tribunal’s treatment of arbitrability as a question governed exclusively by the law of the seat, its refusal to give effect to the mandatory rules of the project’s home state, and its rejection of the argument that the agreement was governed by the joint venture’s lex societatis rather than the parties’ chosen Swedish law. The tribunal also decided that, under Swedish law, the limitation period applicable to claims arising under a joint venture agreement is the ten-year period under the Limitations Act rather the shorter three-year period under the Partnership Act.

Four further arbitral decisions arose from a single dispute under a purchase order for logistic services. The first, a decision on jurisdiction, addresses a familiar difficulty: a purchase order providing for SCC arbitration in Stockholm and general purchasing conditions providing for ICC arbitration elsewhere. The tribunal’s reasoning on the law governing the arbitration agreement under Article 48 of the Swedish Arbitration Act, on which of the two clauses prevailed, and on the enforceability of a ‘negotiate as much as possible’ precondition to arbitration speaks directly to the drafting and enforcement of such provisions. Eventually, the tribunal decided that it had jurisdiction, finding that the arbitration agreement was governed by Swedish law, that pursuant to that law the SCC arbitration clause in the purchase order prevailed, and that the ‘negotiate as much as possible’ precondition to arbitration referred to a standard that was too vague and was thus unenforceable.

The same arbitration produced two separate awards under Article 51(5) of the SCC Arbitration Rules 2017 for reimbursement of the claimant’s payment of the respondent’s unpaid share of the advance on costs. They set out the tribunal’s view of when such an award should be issued and the narrow exceptions to that course, including whether a sanctions-based illegality defense might justify withholding relief, and treat interest on the advance as a procedural matter for the law of the seat notwithstanding the parties’ choice of English law to govern the contract.

The final award in that dispute concerns the respondent’s refusal to pay the outstanding sums under the purchase order, advanced on the basis of a payment mechanism tied to an advance payment guarantee bond, a designated-account condition, and force majeure arising from sanctions on the claimant’s former parent company. The tribunal’s analysis of when a contractual payment mechanism collapses, of estoppel by convention under English law, and of the duty to explore payment in alternative currencies through non-sanctioned channels addresses questions that arise increasingly often in sanctions-affected commercial relationships.