The UK's competition authority spent fifteen months on a partnership it ultimately said wasn't a merger at all. Background The UK Competition and Markets Authority closed its merger inquiry into the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership on 5 March 2025, concluding that there was no basis to review the arrangement under the UK's merger control regime, and published a full decision on 15 April 2025. The inquiry had examined whether the terms of Microsoft's investment and commercial arra

Ukraine's investment-treaty exposure didn't pause for the invasion. It got more complicated. Background Investment treaty arbitration involving Ukraine has continued throughout the full-scale war, running on two separate tracks that are easy to conflate but legally distinct. One track consists of pre-war disputes, arising from grievances that predate February 2022, working their way through ICSID and other fora on their own long-standing procedural timelines. The other, newer

Panama's annulment of the CK Hutchison port concessions triggered a USD 2 billion ICC arbitration, and effects far beyond it. A case for measuring dispute spillovers.

Saudi Arabia scrapped its Qualified Foreign Investor status. It kept the 49 percent cap. Background On 1 February 2026, Saudi Arabia's Capital Market Authority implemented amendments to the Rules for Foreign Investment in Securities, opening the Kingdom's capital market to all categories of foreign investors for direct investment on the Tadawul, the Saudi stock exchange. The reform eliminates the Qualified Foreign Investor status that had gated direct market access since 2015

What the major law firms' 2026 arbitration forecasts agree on, and why the agreement itself is the interesting part. Background Every January, a cluster of major international law firms publish forward-looking notes on arbitration trends for the year ahead. Read individually, each is a piece of client-facing commentary. Read together, the 2026 crop — from Freshfields, Cleary Gottlieb, Baker McKenzie, Charles River Associates, A&O Shearman and Crowell & Moring, among others —

Publishers move to join a proposed class action against Google over AI training — and why that procedural step matters more than it sounds. Background On 15 January 2026, publishers Hachette Book Group and Cengage Learning filed a motion to intervene in an existing, author-led proposed class action against Google in the Northern District of California, arising out of allegations that Google misused copyrighted books to train its Gemini AI models. The publishers' filing specif

Most investor-state research studies treaties. UNCTAD's newest report studies statutes instead — and finds the same risks hiding in plainer sight. Background UNCTAD published Investment Policy Monitor, Issue No. 32, on 4 December 2025, under the title Investor–State Arbitration under Investment Laws: Risks and Policy Lessons. It builds on the earlier Investment Policy Monitor No. 29, which had tracked global trends in the drafting of national investment laws, and turns instea

UNCTAD's World Investment Report 2025 shows FDI falling for a second straight year, down sharply in Europe and up in North America. What the split means.

Romania is leaving the Energy Charter Treaty — but Article 47's twenty-year sunset clause means the treaty's investment protections outlive the withdrawal itself. A look at why exiting an energy treaty is not the same as being free of it.

UNCITRAL WGIII produces a complete, dated, public drafting record going back a decade. Read as a corpus rather than as doctrine, it becomes measurable.

A stayed award, a transparency report and a caseload statistic. Each shows a gap between what investment arbitration is designed to do and what it observably does.