In an expedited arbitration at the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce (SCC), a final award was rendered regarding a franchise agreement. The award included obligations for the parties to jointly and severally pay the arbitral costs consisting of the arbitrator's fee and the SCC's fee in certain specified amounts. The amounts had already been raised as advances. In the operative part of the award, the arbitrator had also ordered the losing parties (a company and a representative as guarantor) to pay the final costs of the arbitration between the parties.
The question in the case was whether the obligation to pay the arbitral costs was sufficiently clear and could be used as a basis for enforcement of the arbitral award by the Enforcement Authority following an application by the winning party. The losing company went bankrupt. Enforcement was therefore directed only against the representative of the losing company in his capacity as guarantor.
The Supreme Court notes that the arbitral costs concerned in the enforcement proceedings relate to such arbitral costs that an arbitrator under the Arbitration Act may, at the request of a party, order the other party to reimburse, that these rules are optional, but that the SCC arbitration rules applied by the parties under the arbitration agreement do not deviate from the provisions of the Act in any other way than specifying the basis for the allocation of costs and dividing up and naming the costs differently.
According to the Supreme Court, it is clear from the obligation that it is a question of joint and several liability and that the representative is obliged to pay to the successful party what he has previously paid of the arbitration costs. The amounts relating to the arbitrator's fees and the SCC's fees are set out in another paragraph of the operative part of the award. It can be inferred from the advance payments and the deduction made that the parties each paid half of those costs. The amount to which the obligation relates can therefore be easily calculated.
Against this background, the Supreme Court concludes that the operative part of the judgment contains a sufficiently clear obligation for the representative to compensate the winning party for what that company has paid of the arbitration costs, which means that there is no obstacle to enforcement.
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