Article 112 of the Brazilian Civil Code provides:

Article 483 of the Brazilian Code of Civil Procedure provides:

Article 4, paragraph 2, of Resolution n. 9/2005 of the Superior Court of Justice provides:

Kia Motors Company (Kia), the successor of Asia Motors Company, had a commercial relationship with Asia Motors do Brasil S/A (Asia Motors) and other companies based on a joint venture agreement executed on 24 June 1997, as well as on the shareholders' agreement and the bylaws of the joint venture company.

Due to breaches of the joint venture agreement, Kia requested interim relief and initiated a civil suit in the courts of the State of Bahia. It subsequently filed a request for arbitration with the ICC (having made it clear, when seeking interim relief and commencing the civil suit, that it had no intention of waiving or breaching the arbitration clause in the joint venture agreement). Kia also asserted that turning to state courts was a necessary and preliminary step as a matter of urgency, since the arbitral tribunal had not yet been constituted.

A final decision was made in the judicial proceedings in December 2009 and a decision was made on the recognition of the ICC arbitral award in February 2012.

The STJ held that, even though the shareholders' agreement and the bylaws of the joint venture company contained only choice-of-court provisions, the fact that there was an arbitration clause in the joint venture agreement (umbrella agreement) was sufficient to infer that the parties had chosen arbitration as the dispute settlement mechanism for their legal relationship as a whole.

The STJ noted that, since the Brazilian judicial proceedings were settled in 2009 and the recognition of the foreign arbitral award was decided in 2012, the issues in the arbitration that had already been decided in the court proceedings could not be recognised. Indeed, Brazilian arbitral awards and court judgments are immediately effective in the Brazilian territory once they have become res judicata, which is not the case for foreign decisions in general. These will only become effective upon full or partial recognition by the STJ.

The STJ handled two important and rare issues in this case with technical and legal accuracy, without looking into the merits of the dispute. The court provided useful confirmation that an arbitration clause inserted in an umbrella agreement is valid for all connected agreements and, for the first time, partially recognised a foreign arbitral award, on the grounds of res judicata, as some issues addressed in the award had already been finally settled in Brazilian judicial proceedings.