Review on the merits

The Supreme Court sitting en banc unified the case law on the issue of the review on the merits of an award, rendered pursuant to an arbitration clause stipulated before the 2006 reform of Italian arbitration law, in proceedings commenced after that reform (decisions nos. 9284 – Italian text available here – 9285 – Italian text available here – and 9341 – Italian text available here – of 9 May 2016).

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The return of the twin-track approach

A recent decision of the Court of first instance Naples (decision no. 4874 of 19 April 2016, Italian text available here) follows the (outdated) line of cases, according to which two different types of corporate arbitration would be possible: on the one hand, corporate arbitration pursuant to article 34(2) of Legislative Decree 5/2003 (which states that “the arbitration clause shall specify the number of the arbitrators and how to appoint them. In any case, the arbitrators shall be appointed by a third party unrelated to the company; otherwise, the clause shall be deemed as null and void (…)”); and on the other hand, common arbitration pursuant to Article 808 of Italian Code of Civil Procedure. This is the so-called “twin-track”, which has already been discussed in this post.

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