In a decision dated 7 May 2025, the French Supreme Court provided important clarification regarding the arbitrator’s duty of disclosure.
The dispute involved the Ecuadorian company Seitur and the Dutch company CW Travel Holdings (CWT). In the ICC arbitration proceedings, the case information sheet mentioned a third party, Polimundo, among the “other entities involved”. Seitur argued that this mention required the arbitrator it had appointed to disclose his personal ties with the head of Polimundo, failing which the arbitral tribunal would be irregularly constituted.
The Paris Court of Appeal dismissed this argument and the French Supreme Court upheld the decision: the mere mention of an entity in the case information sheet, a document of a “purely declarative” nature, does not allow one to presume that it is involved in the dispute. In this case, Polimundo was not a party to the arbitration and any potential award against CWT would have had no financial or commercial impact on Polimundo, which therefore had no interest in the outcome of the arbitration. The arbitrator was therefore not required to disclose his personal ties to this third-party company.
The Court’s decision is therefore in line with its previous case law (Soletanche judgment, 25 May 2022, No. 20-23.148), by reiterating that the duty to disclose arises only if the arbitrator’s connections are “likely to raise reasonable doubts amongst the parties as to his impartiality and independence”. In other words, it is the actual and concrete involvement of a third party in the dispute, and not its mere mention in a declaratory document, that counts.
This ruling is particularly useful for practitioners: the case information sheet is a tool for transparency, but it does not in itself create an independent duty to disclose. The assessment of independence and impartiality remains a case-by-case matter, entrusted to the judges.
