Anglo-Adriatic Group Limited v. Republic of Albania (ICSID Case No. ARB/17/6) - Award - 7 February 2019 – Case Report

The claims of the investor were rejected on jurisdictional grounds. The Tribunal was not satisfied that the Claimant had made or had title to any investment in Albania. The Tribunal upheld the objection raised by Albania concerning the claimant's title to an investment. At the beginning of the 1990s, Albania had launched a privatisation programme based on the distribution of vouchers to its population. At the same time, investment funds were allowed to combine these vouchers and use them to acquire privatised assets. Ultimately, only three funds were licensed to operate, including the Anglo-Adriatic Investment Fund ("AAIF"), partly owned by a group of four individual foreign investors from the United Kingdom and Ireland. Those same investors had set up a separate entity, Anglo-Adriatic Group Limited, in 1996 in the British Virgin Islands ("BVI") to participate in the Albanian privatisation process. Finally, the Tribunal upheld Albania's objection to the claimant's title to the investment. The Tribunal therefore decided that it had no jurisdiction to deal with Anglo-Adriatic's claims, as the company had not proved that any title had been transferred to it by the shareholders of the AAIF.