Updated at 1:30 p.m.
A Washington federal judge on Monday afternoon denied (PDF) a Thai company's petition for help in recovering a $56 million arbitration award against the government of Laos.
U.S. District Judge John Bates found that the Thai company had failed to show that the parties it hoped to serve had any presence or ties to the District. Therefore, he said, the court couldn't help.
The company, Thai-Lao Lignite Co. Ltd., had accused the Laotian government of breaching a 1994 contract for it to mine coal reserves in the Hongsa region of Laos and also to develop a power plant on the same site.
The dispute went to arbitration and a Kuala Lumpur-based tribunal sided with Thai-Lao. A French tribunal confirmed the award, but Thai-Lao filed a petition in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for help finding French assets or debts held by the Laotian government that could be fair game for attachment.
Under French law, a prevailing party can freeze a respondent’s assets. The problem, according to Thai-Lao’s petition, is that French courts lack legal mechanisms for discovery of assets. Thai-Lao petitioned the D.C. court to serve a French company, Electricite de France International, with a discovery request, because Thai-Lao believed the company had an office in Washington. Electricite de France International owns and operates a large hydroelectric dam in Laos.
In trying to serve the French company, however, that Thai-Lao discovered that it didn’t have an office in Washington, Bates wrote. A subsidiary of the company, EDF Inc., had maintained a D.C. office in the past, but had since moved to Chevy Chase, Md. EDF also disputed the extent of its ties to Electricite de France International.
“It would be a less efficient means of assistance to participants in any French proceeding (not to mention, of questionable prudence) for this Court to direct a French entity, through its U.S.-based subsidiary, to produce France-based documents or information about French assets to a French court in petitioners' attempt to satisfy a French judgment,” Bates wrote.
Lead counsel for the defendants, Arnold & Porter’s Paolo DiRosa, said Thai-Lao was “trying to get [information] through the back door.”
“It was correctly dismissed because these petitioners were trying to obtain information that really they had already tried to obtain in France and were unable to under the French legal system,” DiRosa said.
Lead counsel for Thai-Lao, James Berger of New York’s Paul Hastings, said that his client "never tried to get [the information] in France because there’s no discovery process in France.”
"We were disappointed” by Bates’ decision, Berger said. “We brought this petition based on publicly-available information. We learned, unfortunately, in the course of attempting to serve this petition that there were several inaccurate descriptions of these corporate entities" in that public information.
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