RIL moves SC against Delhi HC order in $1.7 billion gas dispute with govt

NEW DELHI: Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) and its foreign partners have moved the Supreme Court against the Delhi High Court‘s February ruling quashing an arbitral award in their favour in the dispute with the Centre’s $1.7 billion claim over alleged siphoning of gas from a Krishan=Godavari field off the Andhra coast.RIL filed the lead petition on May 14, while its partners BP Exploration (Alpha), a subsidiary of UK’s BP Plc, and Canadian firm Niko Ltd filed similar petitions separately.The high court had on February 14 ruled against RIL and its partners and upheld the government’s claim on the ground of making “unjust enrichment” by extracting gas that migrated from state-run ONGC’s block adjacent to the consortium’s KG-D6 field.The case dates back to 2013 when ONGC claimed its IG and KG-DWN-98/2 blocks adjacent to RIL’s KG-D6 field shared a common gas pool. It moved the high court, saying RIL, which had already put KG-D6 into operation, was extracting gas that migrated from its blocks that were still under development.The oil ministry approached the high court after an arbitration panel led by Singapore-based Lawrence Woo struck down its demand for nearly $1.6 billion in cost, including interest, and $175 million as additional cumulative ‘profit petroleum’ payable till March 31, 2016 towards “disgorgement of unjust enrichment” made by RIL.In the February 14 order, the division bench of Justices Rekha Palli and Saurabh Banerjee had quashed an international arbitration tribunal’s ruling rejecting the government’s claim and overturned an earlier order by justice Anup Jairam Bhambani verdict upholding the arbitral award in favour of the RIL-led consortium.“We are setting aside the impugned order dated May 9, 2023 passed by the learned single judge, and the arbitral award passed by the learned arbitral tribunal dated 2018, being contrary to the settled position of law along the pending applications, if any, leaving the parties to bear their own costs,” the division bench of Justices Palli and Banerjee had said.In his order, Justice Bhambani had held that,”This court is not persuaded to hold that the conclusions drawn by the arbitral tribunal are such that no reasonable person would reach. Suffice it to say that the view taken by the arbitral tribunal is most certainly a ‘possible view’, which calls for no interference… … this court finds no ground to interfere with the majority arbitral award; which is accordingly upheld”.