In Tamil Nadu Electricity Board v ST-CMS Electric Company Private Limited [2007] EWHC 1713 (Comm), Cooke J rejected a challenge to the jurisdiction of an ICC tribunal brought pursuant to section 72 of the Arbitration Act 1996. He held that the tribunal, appointed pursuant to an English arbitration clause, had jurisdiction to determine issues of Indian law even if, as a matter of Indian law, those issues would mandatorily be required to be determined by the Central Electricity Authority.
The judgment contains a useful exposition of the relationship between the proper law of the contract and the law governing the arbitration agreement or arbitration. There is also some helpful discussion of the scope of the presumption, in the absence of foreign law evidence, that foreign law is the same as English law.