Top court upholds status quo on handover of Dhaka Elevated Expressway shares

The stay will remain in place until the first arbitration meeting is held between the Italian-Thai company and the Chinese company over the debt, reports bdnews24.com

The Appellate Division has upheld the status quo order on the transfer of Dhaka Elevated Expressway shares held by an Italian-Thai company to China's Sinohydro Corporation Limited.

A full eight-member bench of justices led by Chief Justice Obaidul Hassan made the decision after a hearing on Thursday.

The order will remain in place until the first arbitration meeting is held between the Italian-Thai company and the Chinese company over the debt dispute, but afterwards there will be nothing blocking the transfer, lawyers said.

On May 16, the Appellate Division issued a two-week halt on the transfer of the shares.

Senior lawyer ABM Amin Uddin, Sheikh Mohammad Morshed and Imtiaz Faruk represented the Italian-Thai company while Advocates Mehdi Hasan Chodhury and Mostafizur Rahman Khan represented Sinohydro.

Mehdi said, "We told the court that work has stopped. The status quo order will be maintained until the day of the first meeting of the arbitration process. This means the status quo will not be in place after the first meeting, which means there will be nothing barring the transfer of shares."

In 2013, the Bangladesh government gave a work order to the Italian development company to build the elevated expressway. But when they failed to start work, they formed a joint venture with two Chinese companies.

The three companies jointly took out the loan for the project. There was a condition that if any of the partners failed to pay the interest on the loan in January or June, that part of the interest would be paid to the other two guarantors and the shares of the company that failed to pay the interest would go to the rest. The Bangladesh government also approved the condition.

Mehdi Hasan had previously said that the Italian-Thai company failed to pay the interest on the loan in 2023. For that reason, when the Chinese bank that gave the loan wrote to the Italian company on Jan 23, 2024, they went to arbitration.