Introduction
Indian courts can grant interim relief in foreign seated arbitration under Section 9 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 (the “Arbitration Act”), even after the arbitral tribunal has been constituted and even where the institutional rules chosen by the parties provide for emergency or interim measures. The Bombay High Court reaffirmed this position in two judgments delivered in July 2026: Norvic Shipping Asia PTE Limited v. Zigma International, decided on 2 July 2026 in Commercial Arbitration Petition (L) No. 15734 of 2026, and Malaney Trading & Services LLP v. Uzer Makina VE Kalip Sanayi A.S. and Others, decided on 7 July 2026 in Commercial Arbitration Petition No. 228 of 2022.
The reasoning that runs through both rulings is grounded in enforcement reality. An interim order made by a tribunal seated outside India cannot be directly enforced in India, so a party whose counterparty holds assets here must eventually approach an Indian court in any event. The Bombay High Court treated that reality as decisive, holding that the availability of interim relief before a foreign tribunal does not displace the court’s power to preserve the subject matter of the dispute and to ensure that a foreign award does not end up as a mere paper decree.
The Statutory Basis for Section 9 Relief in Foreign Seated Arbitrations
Part I of the Arbitration Act ordinarily applies only where the place of arbitration is in India, as provided in Section 2(2). The proviso to Section 2(2), introduced by the Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Act, 2015, carves out an exception for international commercial arbitrations seated outside India.
Subject to an agreement to the contrary, it makes Section 9 (interim measures by court), Section 27 (court assistance in taking evidence) and Sections 37(1)(b) and 37(3) (appeals) applicable to such arbitrations, provided the resulting award is enforceable and recognised under Part II of the Act. Both disputes before the Bombay High Court involved a foreign party, a foreign shipping company in Norvic Shipping and a foreign principal in Malaney, and therefore fell within the meaning of an international commercial arbitration under Section 2(1)(f).
Section 9(1) permits a party to approach the court before or during arbitral proceedings, or after the award is made but before it is enforced, and empowers the court to order measures such as securing the amount in dispute, preserving the subject matter, and granting interim injunctions. The difficulty in a foreign seated arbitration arises from the gap between Section 9 and Section 17. Under Section 17(2), an interim order of an arbitral tribunal is deemed to be an order of the court and is enforceable under the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, but this deeming fiction attaches only to tribunals operating under Part I, that is, tribunals seated in India.
A foreign tribunal’s interim order also does not qualify as a “foreign award” capable of enforcement under Part II, which is directed at final awards. The Delhi High Court addressed this gap in Raffles Design International India Private Limited v. Educomp Professional Education Limited, 2016 SCC OnLine Del 5521, holding that an emergency arbitrator’s order in a Singapore seated arbitration could not be enforced as such in India, and that the aggrieved party’s route lay in a fresh application under Section 9, which the court would decide on its own assessment.
The Bombay High Court’s July 2026 rulings build on this line of authority and on the Delhi High Court’s later decision in Shanghai Electric Group Co. Ltd. v. Reliance Infrastructure Ltd., 2022 SCC OnLine Del 2112, which granted Section 9 protection in aid of a foreign seated arbitration.
Norvic Shipping Asia PTE Limited v. Zigma International
The Dispute and the LMAA Arbitration
The dispute in Norvic Shipping arose out of a Repayment Schedule Agreement under which the respondent’s liability of USD 215,310.01 towards demurrage was not in dispute. Arbitration commenced on 27 March 2026 before a sole arbitrator in London under the Terms of the London Maritime Arbitrators Association (LMAA). The petitioner approached the Bombay High Court under Section 9, contending that the respondent had made no payment despite repeated reminders, that the admitted amount required protection until the arbitration concluded, and that even if the LMAA tribunal could grant interim relief, its order could not be directly enforced in India. Securing the respondent’s Indian assets was therefore necessary to prevent the eventual award from becoming a paper decree.
The respondent resisted the petition on the grounds that part of the claim was subject to an oral set-off, that the petition contained no allegation that it was dissipating or removing its assets, and that it was unable to pay because it was facing financial difficulty and its overall financial condition was not sound. The last of these submissions sat uneasily with the respondent’s position that the petitioner’s recovery faced no real risk, since a weakening financial position is precisely the circumstance in which an award may later prove unenforceable.
Findings of the Bombay High Court
The Court held that the petitioner had established a strong prima facie case and that the balance of convenience lay in its favour. It further found that the record contained objective material indicating a possibility that the respondent’s available assets would diminish before the award could be enforced.
On that basis, the Court directed the respondent to secure the petitioner’s claim until the conclusion of the arbitral proceedings and the subsequent enforcement of the award, an order squarely within the court’s power under Section 9(1)(ii)(b) to secure the amount in dispute in the arbitration. The Court also used the occasion to set out the requirements a party must satisfy to obtain interim relief in aid of a foreign seated international commercial arbitration, which are discussed below.
Malaney Trading & Services LLP v. Uzer Makina VE Kalip Sanayi A.S.
The Agency Agreement and the Court’s Earlier Direction
Malaney concerned a Commercial Agency and Distribution Agreement under which Malaney Trading was the exclusive distributor in India of Uzer Makina’s technology used in the tyre manufacturing industry, and was entitled to commission on Uzer Makina’s transactions in India. CEAT Limited and MRF Limited, arrayed as the second and third respondents, had used that technology, and MRF had in the past remitted payments to Uzer Ithalat Ihracat Sanayi Ve Tic. A.S., a wholly owned subsidiary of Uzer Makina. The arbitration was administered by the Netherlands Arbitration Institute, whose rules themselves provide for interim relief.
At an earlier stage of the Section 9 proceedings, the Bombay High Court had directed MRF to give Malaney Trading ten days’ prior notice before making any payment to Uzer Makina, so that Malaney Trading could seek interim protection in respect of that payment. MRF thereafter gave notice of payment to Uzer Makina’s subsidiary. An arbitral award was subsequently rendered allowing certain of Malaney Trading’s claims, and Uzer Ithalat was added as the fourth respondent to the petition.
Interim Protection After a Breach of the Court’s Direction
During the arbitral proceedings, Malaney Trading discovered that Uzer Makina and Uzer Ithalat had exported technology worth EUR 1.5 million to MRF, and that MRF had paid for it in breach of the Court’s earlier direction. The Bombay High Court held that MRF had flouted that direction, and that the conduct of the parties showed a real risk that the fruits of the arbitration would be lost by the time the award came to be recognised and enforced in India.
It therefore considered it equitable and necessary to grant interim relief. The case illustrates the post-award limb of Section 9(1), which allows the court to act after an award is made but before it is enforced, and which assumes particular importance for a foreign award that must still pass through recognition and enforcement under Sections 47 to 49 of the Arbitration Act.
Emergency Arbitrator Provisions Do Not Oust Section 9 Jurisdiction
The most significant clarification in Malaney is that the mere presence of interim relief provisions in the rules of the administering institution does not oust the jurisdiction of Indian courts under Section 9. The proviso to Section 2(2) allows parties to exclude Section 9 only by “an agreement to the contrary”, and the Bombay High Court has made clear that choosing institutional rules which provide for an emergency arbitrator or tribunal-ordered interim measures is not, by itself, such an agreement, whether express or implied.
This reasoning carries considerable weight in practice, because most leading institutional rules now contain emergency arbitrator mechanisms. Had the selection of such rules been treated as an implied exclusion, Section 9 relief in aid of foreign seated arbitration would have been unavailable in the very cases where it is most often sought. Parties who genuinely intend to exclude the jurisdiction of Indian courts must therefore say so clearly in the arbitration agreement, and silence or a bare reference to institutional rules will not suffice.
Why Section 9(3) Does Not Bar Relief in Foreign Seated Arbitrations
Section 9(3), also inserted by the 2015 amendment, provides that once the arbitral tribunal has been constituted, the court shall not entertain a Section 9 application unless it finds that circumstances exist which may not render the remedy under Section 17 efficacious. The provision was designed to channel interim applications to the tribunal once it is in place, and its relevance here is evident, since the LMAA tribunal in Norvic Shipping and the tribunal in Malaney had already been constituted when the court was approached.
The Bombay High Court reasoned that this restriction does not operate in the same way for foreign seated arbitrations. Section 9(3) assumes that the tribunal’s order will carry the enforceability conferred by Section 17(2), which treats an order of an India-seated tribunal as an order of the court. An interim order of a foreign seated tribunal or emergency arbitrator enjoys no such status, and, following Raffles Design, it can be given effect in India only by approaching an Indian court for interim relief in terms of that order. The alternative remedy before the foreign tribunal therefore falls outside the efficacy requirement of Section 9(3), and the court may entertain the application even though the tribunal is already functioning.
The Threshold for Securing a Claim Under Section 9
In deciding an application for interim relief in aid of a foreign seated arbitration, the Bombay High Court’s concern is the effectiveness of the arbitral process itself. Where no award has yet been made, the applicant must establish a strong prima facie case and must show that refusal of protection would cause irreparable prejudice. The court asks, in substance, whether the claimant may succeed in the arbitration only to find that the respondent’s assets are no longer available to satisfy the award. If the court is satisfied that there is a reasonable possibility of the respondent’s asset base materially reducing before enforcement, it will intervene to prevent the award from being frustrated.
The converse is equally important. Where the respondent is financially sound, holds sufficient assets, and there is no material indicating a reduction in those assets, interim relief is unlikely to be granted. Norvic Shipping shows that the applicant need not prove a deliberate attempt to dissipate assets, which the respondent there argued was absent from the pleadings; objective material pointing to a possible diminution of available assets was sufficient.
The Court’s approach also rests on the settled position that the power under Section 9 is not fettered by the stricter requirements that govern ordinary civil suits. In Nimbus Communications Ltd. v. Board of Control for Cricket in India, 2012 SCC OnLine Bom 287, the Bombay High Court held that while the principles of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, including those on attachment and security before judgment under Order XXXVIII, may guide the exercise of discretion, they do not bind the court with the same rigour in a Section 9 application. The test is whether interim protection is necessary to keep the arbitration meaningful, not whether every procedural precondition of a civil suit has been satisfied.
Consistency with Article 9 of the UNCITRAL Model Law
The rulings sit comfortably with Article 9 of the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration, on which the Arbitration Act is based. Article 9 provides that it is not incompatible with an arbitration agreement for a party to request an interim measure of protection from a court, before or during arbitral proceedings, or for a court to grant such a measure. Recourse to a national court for interim protection is therefore treated as complementary to the arbitral process rather than a departure from it, and the Bombay High Court’s approach respects party autonomy by keeping that recourse open unless the parties have agreed otherwise.
Conclusion
Norvic Shipping and Malaney confirm that interim relief in foreign seated arbitration remains firmly available from Indian courts under Section 9 of the Arbitration Act, read with the proviso to Section 2(2). Neither the constitution of the arbitral tribunal under Section 9(3) nor the adoption of institutional rules providing for emergency arbitration displaces that jurisdiction, because a foreign tribunal’s interim order cannot be enforced in India without the court’s intervention.
The Bombay High Court recognised that compelling a party first to obtain an order abroad and then to return to an Indian court to give it effect would impose a two-stage process at additional time and expense, when the same protection can be sought directly. Relief will, however, be granted only where the applicant shows a strong prima facie case and objective material indicating a real risk that the respondent’s assets will diminish before the award can be enforced.
The scope of interim judicial remedies in arbitration also connects with Section 47 CPC: Remedy Beyond Section 9 Arbitration, which examines enforcement-related court remedies.
