The Dispute Resolution team at Hadef & Partners, comprising of Partner, Karim Mahmoud, Senior Associate, Maria Lezala and Associates, Abdul Hannan Mian and Harriet McLaughlin, has authored the UAE chapter in the 16th edition of Lexology ‘In-Depth – Dispute Resolution” review.
This comprehensive guide examines the key aspects of UAE’s dispute resolution rules and practice, and developments over the past 12 months.
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In the second of two articles on the Hormuz toll crisis, Mohamed Eissa of Hadef & Partners examines the practical commercial and legal consequences of Iran's $1 to $2 million transit toll, covering who bears the cost under time charters, voyage charters, and CIF and FOB sale contracts, what war risk insurance covers and where coverage disputes are building, and what shipowners, commodity traders, and in-house counsel should do. The article includes a multi-party hypothetical scenario illustrating how a single toll demand generates simultaneous disputes across sanctions law, charterparty performance, cargo obligations, insurance coverage, and UAE court jurisdiction.
A transit toll on the Strait of Hormuz is unlawful under international law, and paying it is likely to expose parties to criminal or civil liability under applicable sanctions regimes. In this first of two articles on the Hormuz toll crisis, Mohamed Eissa of Hadef & Partners examines why the toll violates UNCLOS and longstanding customary international law predating it on multiple independent grounds, why the non-ratification argument advanced in support of the toll fails on its own terms, and how the resulting sanctions compliance trap places shipowners, commodity traders, and their counsel in a position of legal impossibility that no single instrument currently resolves. The second article addresses how the toll is allocated under charterparty and trade term frameworks, what insurance covers, and what practitioners should do now.
Abu Dhabi has introduced specialised committees to resolve family business disputes, reflecting a wider UAE shift towards more tailored and commercially sensitive dispute resolution mechanisms for family-owned enterprises.