AYY v AYZ and another

Colin Seow AR:

[1] Summons No 4895 of 2015 (“the Application”) was an application taken out by AYY in Originating Summons No 695 of 2015 (“the Action”) seeking a stay, under section 10(9)(a) of the International Arbitration Act (Cap 143A, 2002 Rev Ed) (“the Act”), of an arbitration involving AYY, AYZ and AZA (“the Arbitration”) pending the disposal of the Action. The Action comprises AYY’s challenge, under section 10(3) of the Act and/or Article 16(3) of the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration, against the arbitral tribunal’s affirmative ruling on its jurisdiction over the parties’ substantive dispute in the Arbitration. The Action, which is being resisted by AYZ and AZA, is presently pending before the High Court.

[3] Given the apparent dearth of published case authorities relating to applications taken out under section 10(9)(a) of the Act, I now issue a note of my oral judgment with a view to sow some jurisprudential seeds in the existing corpus of law which, hopefully, might one day again be of aid when a similar stay application has to be considered in another case.

[4] Section 10(9) of the Act provides as follows:

[5] At the hearing of the Application, there was no case authority cited to me which dealt specifically with the proper test to be applied for stay of arbitrations under section 10(9)(a) of the Act. In fact, the submissions made by the parties in the Application appeared to draw mostly on, inter alia, first-principle arguments, what each party considered would be a commonsensical result in the Application, and general propositions relating to the idea of prejudice.

[6] In rendering my decision in the Application, I adapted the established principles that apply generally to stay of execution of court judgments pending appeals (see, eg, HSBC Institutional Trust Services (Singapore) Ltd (trustee of Suntec Real Estate Investment Trust) v Picket & Rail Asia Pacific Pte Ltd [2010] 4 SLR 326). In particular, I took the view that, mutatis mutandis, an appropriate test that could be adopted vis-à-vis an application for stay of arbitration under section 10(9)(a) of the Act was as follows: when a party is exercising his or her right seeking to invoke the court’s supervisory powers under, inter alia, section 10(3) of the Act over an arbitral tribunal’s ruling on jurisdiction, the court ought to see that the party’s challenge against the arbitral tribunal’s jurisdictional ruling, if successful, would not be incapable of providing a full and consummate redress.

[9] Accordingly, I found that there were no grounds to invoke the court’s discretion to stay the Arbitration in the present case.