Breaking: A New Treaty Claim against India. Yet Again!

This time it is Germany's Deutsche Telekom which has filed a treaty claim against India under the India-Germany Bilateral Investment Protection Agreement aka Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT). The claim has been filed over the cancelled satellite venture which has earlier led to two separate arbitrations at ICC and PCA under the UNCITRAL Rules between Devas and Antrix which is the marketing arm of the Indian Space Research Organization. Interestingly, this latest development has not yet come to the knowledge of Indian media and hopefully shall be taken from here on. Is it lack of transparency by the government or has just been ignored by the media remains a question. The former seems to be more probable. 

Few months back Antrix had reached the Supreme Court to halt the earlier arbitration which was rejected. More on this here and here. 

The notice for this fresh treaty claim was filed on September 2, 2013. According to external sources, this arbitration is slated to use the ICSID additional facility rules since India is not a party to the ICSID Convention. The most intriguing point is that the India-Germany BIT does not stipulate resolving dispute through ICSID additional facility Rules at all. It is not clear how Deutsche Telekom would pursue it unless it is going to claim some sort of MFN treatment as other Indian BITs do carry a provision of dispute getting resolved through ICSID additional facility rules. Such measure, if taken would be quite interesting. 

According to an earlier report in the Mint which was released during the SC trial, Deutsche Telekom holds a 20% stake in Devas, while Columbia Capital and Telcom Ventures each hold around 17%. The rest is held by the founders of Devas including Ramachandran Vishwanathan, chief executive of the firm. 

The project was to give Devas bandwidth to offer broadband services to consumers in India. The newspaper reported that “The cabinet committee on security called off the deal in 2011 after questions arose on whether the procedure followed by Antrix to allocate the air waves was the most economically favourable possible for the exchequer. The committee scrapped the deal on the grounds that it was not in the security interest of the country.” 

Deutsche Telekom had written to India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last year threatening arbitration but the amount was not disclosed. An indication of Deutsche Telekom filing an investment treaty claim before it actually did was reported in April (See here).