Runners-up honors go to a Covington & Burling team led by Marney Cheek, Jonathan Gimblett and Nikhil Gore. They represented DTEK Krymenergo, the Ukrainian company that owned the main electricity supplier and distributor in Crimea prior to the peninsula’s 2014 annexation by Russia, in an investment treaty arbitration against targeting the Russian Federation with expropriation claims. A three-arbitrator panel at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague this week found that the Russian Federation’s actions violated its bilateral investment treaty with Ukraine and awarded Covington’s client about $260 million in damages, plus attorneys’ fees and costs.
Runners-up honors also go to a team at Mayer Brown that secured an assurance from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that certain corporate bonds issued by private companies fall outside the agency’s Rule 15c2-11 disclosure requirements aimed at over-the-counter trading in equity securities. In an order issued last week, the SEC cited a petition the firm filed on behalf of the National Association of Manufacturers and the Kentucky Association of Manufacturers finding “it is appropriate in the public interest, and consistent with the protection of investors, to exempt brokers and dealers from the requirements of Rule 15c2-11, with respect to Rule 144A fixed-income securities.” It’s worth noting that the petition lingered long enough that Mayer Brown sought mandamus from the Sixth Circuit to force the SEC to take action on it. Last week’s SEC order landed on the day the agency was due to file its response brief at the Sixth Circuit. The Mayer Brown team included Andrew Pincus, Eddie Best, Anna Pinedo, Carmen Longoria-Green, Wajdi Mallat and Ziv Schwartz. The team at NAM included GC Linda Kelly, Erica Klenicki, Michael Tilghman and Charles Crain.
