Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Saturday inaugurated the Mumbai Centre for International Arbitration (MCIA), which is being seen as a major step towards making Mumbai an International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) and providing an arbitration platform for Indian business houses to negotiate commercial disputes.
Mr. Fadnavis, who formally launched the MCIA on the 20th floor of Express Towers at Nariman Point, said, “The dream which started 18 months ago has come true. The MCIA is state-of-the-art and will go a long way in creating the ecosystem for international arbitration.”
Speaking at the concluding session of a day-long seminar on arbitration, Mr. Fadnavis said the Arbitration and Conciliation Amendment Act, 2015, which provides strict timelines for completing arbitral proceedings along with the scope for resolving disputes by a fast-track mechanism, had made arbitration proceedings more credible and dependable, and was the starting point for creating this ecosystem.
The Chief Minister, who personally supervised the creation of MCIA along with BJP MP Poonam Mahajan, said the State government had become the first government in the country to clear an policy for institutional arbitration. “So, there is a dependable, credible transparent policy which supports this beautiful infrastructure…I am told after Singapore, ours is the first State which has such a transparent policy on arbitration,” he said.
He said Indian parties make up an estimated 30 per cent of the arbitration cases handled by the Singapore and London International Arbitration Centres at present, and hoped that Indian business houses find the MCIA more cost-effective, and less time consuming.
State Chief Secretary Swadheen Kshatriya told the audience comprising several top lawyers, sitting and retired judges that the State arbitration policy has made it binding that all government contracts henceforth should have standard arbitration clauses. “All commercial contracts worth more than Rs. 5 crore will have the arbitration clauses. Even existing contracts will be modified with the consent of the concerned parties to have arbitration clauses,” Mr. Kshatriya said.
MCIA Chief Executive Officer Madhukeshwar Desai said the MCIA provides for world-class infrastructure for arbitration, equipped with sound-proof rooms, access to arbitration rooms only with digital key cards, 24x7 functionality and live transcription services recording every word said during arbitration proceedings for transparency. “Even before this inauguration, we have already conducted our first arbitration successfully, and have been rated by the global arbitration review as world-class,” he said.
The MCIA will be an independent, not-for-profit organisation governed by a council comprising eminent national and international legal luminaries including Justice S.S. Nijjar, Nish Shetty, Vyapak Desai, Cyril and Pallavi Shroff among others.
It will have a 12-month timeline to complete arbitration seated in India and a prescribed fee structure as per the size of the disputed contract amount, which will enable both parties to know the cost of arbitral proceedings before they approach MCIA.
“We hope that Mr. Desai and Poonam Mahajan come to us after a few years [complaining] that there are space constraints at MCIA. We have already planned for a new building for an arbitration centre in the master plan of the International Finance Centre at Bandra Kurla Complex,” Mr. Fadnavis said.
I am told after Singapore, ours is the first State
which has such a transparent policy
on arbitrationDevendra FadnavisChief Minister
