Last year King & Spalding was shouting from the rooftops that it had won the biggest-ever individual recovery before the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). The firm’s client, investor Waguih Siag, claimed that his Red Sea property was seized by Egyptian authorities–partly because he had lined up Israeli financing to build a hotel. An ICSID panel awarded him $133 million.
But Siag is now involved in a nasty fee dispute, and he says that Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has nothing on his rapacious lawyers at King & Spalding. The contingency fee called for Siag to give his lawyers an extra 1 percent of the award for every $50,000 in costs the firm advanced to him, beyond the first $500,000. According to Siag, thanks to such advances, the firm’s share of the recovery exceeded 80 percent–$106 million–and threatened to reach 100 percent bythe time he could collect his money. (The firm disputes Siag’s math.)
