Just three months. That’s how long it took for the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) to use new powers to publicly name and shame a virtual asset (VA) exchange. Known as “JPEX” , the unlicensed crypto exchange was warned about potential breaches of the...
Scott Gardiner and Tiffany Kwong take to the road in a look at hydrogen cars, trucks and buses. Accessible hydrogen refuelling stations are on the way in the EU, and Germany is powering ahead with technology for trucks. Finally, Scott and Tiffany should soon get a...
This quarter, Urszula McCormack and Emily Fox look at the latest developments in central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) worldwide - including several projects on which the KWM team has advised. In our regular update, we share the shifts happening in the world of...
Suraj Sajnani and Jesse Tizard look at a recent Hong Kong court decision which determined that decisions regarding compliance with arbitration preconditions are a matter of admissibility. On 30 June 2023, the Court of Final Appeal (CFA) delivered its judgment in C v...
Scott Gardiner and Tiffany Kwong share their latest insight from Hong Kong: there's no escaping the heat of summer, but there is cool relief coming for investors and issuers in the climate finance space. A prototype that will classify financial products and...
Urszula McCormack, Evan Manolios and Jack McNally give virtual asset service providers (VASPs) the low down on operating beyond June 1 in Hong Kong under a strict new regime. For nearly three years, KWM’s global fintech and blockchain team has exploded client inboxes...
Suraj Sajnani, Sian Knight and Michelle Chen discuss the Hong Kong High Court's express confirmation, for the first time ever, that cryptocurrency is “property” and can form the subject matter of a trust. The Court’s decision in Re Gatecoin Ltd aligns Hong Kong’s...
Urszula McCormack and Leonie Tear set out the steps to take to manage the case no company wants to encounter: being held to ransom in a cyber attack. Finding out that customer data has been hacked, exfiltrated and is being held to ransom by an unknown threat actor is...
Peter Bullock discusses the rise of crypto disputes and why they will continue to occur in 2023 and beyond Although it has been 14 years since the the presumed pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto defined the genesis block of bitcoin, the subject of cryptocurrencies, digital...
Jesse Tizard and Jenny Fok discuss a recent Hong Kong case in which it was determined that unless and until there is a crystallised “dispute”, there is nothing to refer to arbitration. While that may seem obvious, this is the key lesson from the recent (and somewhat...
The case of C v D concerns the issue of whether or not an arbitral tribunal’s decision with respect to compliance with a pre-arbitral tier in a multi-tiered dispute resolution clause is final. The issue is significant and goes to the heart of one of the key...
A smart contract is self-executing code that follows pre-programmed rules, which are then verifiable on a blockchain. As such they are a misnomer. They are not smart, because they can only do what they are programmed to do. They are not so much a contract as a tool...
COVID-19 triggered dramatic changes in the way international arbitration is conducted, but which will remain? Our partner Amanda Lees, based in Singapore, recently shared her insights with The Legal 500 on the Covid-19...
Hourly fees for lawyers are the norm in Hong Kong. Regardless of the outcome of the case, clients usually pay for the time that lawyers spend working on their matters. On 30 June 2022, the government gazetted the Arbitration and Legal Practitioners Legislation...
Litigants at Hong Kong courts now can expect an earlier date to receive their judgments. To ensure that reserved judgments are handed down as expeditiously as is reasonably practicable, the judiciary issued a Practice Direction 36 on 20 May 2022 (“Practice...
This post is part of our series on Climate Change Disputes. Our earlier posts include: Climate Change Disputes 101: An Introduction, a post on Australia (currently, the second most popular jurisdiction for Climate Change Disputes), a post on China Mainland, and a...
“Whether procedural requirement[s]…ha[ve] been fulfilled is a question intrinsically suitable for determination by an arbitral tribunal, and is best decided by an arbitral tribunal in order to give effect to the parties’ presumed intention to achieve a quick,...
HKIAC Statistics: demonstrating the steady strength of Hong Kong as a seat for arbitration Early in the Year of the Tiger, the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre (“HKIAC”) released its Year of the Ox statistics for 2021. Their full report is available here,...
Hong Kong, Guangdong, and Macao have taken the next step to take the Greater Bay Area ("GBA") to the centre stage of international arbitration by jointly forming the Greater Bay Area International Arbitration Centre in Shenzhen (the "Centre"). The Centre is located in...
From 1 December 2021, a claimant can make an application for summary judgment in Hong Kong High Court and District Court cases, notwithstanding an allegation of fraud. What is summary judgment, and how summary is it anyway? In short, a summary judgment application...