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Maire, the Italian engineering group, announced on 31 August that it had won an arbitration at the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in London in its dispute with EuroChem entities over an unfinished contract to build an ammonia and urea plant in Kingisepp, in the Leningrad region. The client was EuroChem North-West-2 (NW2), and the contractors were Italy's Tecnimont, a subsidiary of Maire, and its Russian subsidiary, MT Russia. In 2022, citing EU sanctions, Tecnimont suspended the contract, after which NW2 terminated it.

According to Maire — the arbitration's "partial final award" itself is confidential — the tribunal found that the company had rightly suspended the contract and that EuroChem must pay Tecnimont 260 million euros for the termination. The tribunal also rejected all of EuroChem's financial claims against Tecnimont and MT Russia, Maire said.

NW2 and the Swiss holding company EuroChem Group AG rejected Maire's conclusions. In its statement, EuroChem Group stressed that the contractors had failed to establish joint and several liability on the part of the group's Swiss company — which would in turn have opened the way for them to pursue potential recovery from EuroChem Group in foreign jurisdictions, RBC writes. NW2, for its part, said the tribunal had also found justified its claims for the return of around 60 million euros in unearned advances and had declined to grant two-thirds of Tecnimont's claims against NW2.

On that basis — and given that the Moscow Arbitration Court, a state commercial court, earlier recognised the jurisdiction of the Russian courts in the "sanctions" dispute under Article 248.1 of the Arbitration Procedure Code and ordered 171 billion rubles ($2 billion) to be recovered from Tecnimont — EuroChem's defence team considers that it was the Russian company, not the Italians, that won the arbitration.

According to lawyers cited by RBC, the final balance of claims will be determined once the arbitration under the ICC rules concludes, by the current proceedings in Russia and India (where EuroChem is seeking to enforce the Russian court judgment ordering recovery from Tecnimont), and by whether Tecnimont can make use of the mechanism, provided for under EU sanctions legislation, for recovering losses from EuroChem Group AG as the owner of NW2, where those losses are caused by claims brought by Russian parties in non-European courts.