Can the parties agree to have a unanimous award in an arbitration agreement?

It is not clear if under Vietnamese law, the parties can agree in an arbitration agreement that the award of the tribunal must be a unanimous award instead of a majority award.

In practice, in a three-arbitrator tribunal of which two are appointed by the parties, the vote of the chairman of the tribunal becomes crucial. This is because the party-appointed arbitrator will likely try to find arguments in favor of the relevant appointing party and the vote of the chairman will likely decide the case. Unlike a court judgement, an arbitration award is confidential (i.e., the public cannot know how an arbitrator decides or reaches his/her conclusion on a case), and is final and binding (i.e., there is no review of the awards by another arbitrator). Accordingly, there is limited public review and peer review of an arbitration award. This gives rise to the risk that the tribunal (or the chairman) decides the case wrongly. One possible way to mitigate this risk is to require the award of the tribunal to be a unanimous award (or to be subject to a higher-than-majority voting). If this is not possible then another way is to remove the rights of the parties to select the arbitrators so that there will be no influence by the parties on the party-appointed arbitrators.

Decree 15/2021 on management of construction investment projects

On 3 March 2021, the Government issued Decree 15 detailing a number of provisions on management of construction investment projects (Decree 15/2021) to replace Decree 59 of the Government on dated 18 June 2015 on the same subject (Decree 59/2015).

Some new key points of Decree 15/2021 are as follows:

  • Encouraging BIM and digital technology solutions: Decree 15/2021 encourages to impose building information modeling (BIM) and digital technology solutions in construction and work operation management activities. BIM file constitutes a component of construction design documents or as-built documents for construction projects or works imposing BIM. Contents and details of BIM would be agreed upon in construction contracts by parties involved in application of BIM.

New guidance on issuance of Land use right certificate

On 30 June 2021, MONRE issued Circular 09/2021, amending some regulations on issuance of land use right certificate (LURC). Key takeaways from Circular 09/2021 are as follows:

· Circular 09/2021 provides a new case where the land user will be issued with a brand new LURC. In particular, if a master LURC covers multiple land parcels, then when the land user conducts the registration of changes to land due to land division, the divided land will be issued with a separate LURC (Article 1.2 of Circular 09/2021). Previously, Circular 23/2014 only contemplates the case that the divided land is issued with separate LURC when there is division of single land parcel into several separate land parcels; and

IMPORTING LNG FOR LNG POWER PLANT

1. Pursuant to Article 6 of Decree 87 of the Government dated 13 March 2018 on gas trading (Decree 87), an entity involving in the import of LNG for trading in Vietnam needs to obtain a certificate on satisfaction of conditions applicable to LNG importing/exporting merchant (Import Certificate) from the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT) before doing such activity.

2. The requirements of Decree 87/2018 seem to be drafted with entities importing LNG to trade in Vietnam in mind, but not for own consumption purpose, for example, a LNG power plant (LNG Power Plant) imports LNG to turn it into power. That said, if the LNG Power Plant imports LNG for own consumption purpose, it is advisable to apply for the Import Certificate because (i) there are no specific regulations guiding how to import LNG for own consumption purpose and (ii) the conditions to issue the Import Certificate set out in Decree 87/2018 mainly focus to ensure the safety of the LNG import activities.