EGYPT Law and Practice Contributed by: Muhammad Ussama and Adam El Shalakany, Shalakany Law Office
6. Interim Remedies 6.1 Availability of Interim Relief
dicts with the situation in arbitrations, whether local or international, where the issue of third-party funding has justifiably attracted considerable attention. 5.3 Contingency Fee Arrangement Contingency fee arrangements are available in Egypt. However, there is no express statutory provision which regulates such arrangements and dictates certain acceptable parameters for such arrangements. Hence, it is common to find lawyers engaged in relation to any given matter on the basis of a fixed fee, a pure suc- cess fee, or a hybrid arrangement that combines ele- ments of fixed and success fee arrangements. 5.4 Insurance In practice, insurance coverage is not available and/ or utilised by disputing parties for litigation, arbitration and ADR. For litigation, court fees that claimants have to pay when filing a court case are frequently nominal monetary amounts. Hence, parties seeking to pursue a claim in litigation do not tend to think about the issue of financing court fees to get their case lodged with court. However, court fees that are calculated at the end of a court case can possibly be quite high depending on the value of the claim that was rejected by court and, thus, the authors are of the opinion that securing insurance coverage could be a smart way of exercising damage control and mitigating damages. 5.5 Costs Dispute resolution costs cannot be recovered from the other side in Egypt unless such costs have been taken into consideration by the court and included in the amount of compensation that is granted in the dis- positive part of a court’s ruling. In this respect, there is a very low likelihood that Egyptian courts would agree to factor litigation costs as part of the incurred damages for which compensation is granted as litiga- tion costs are arguably not “direct” damages that flow from the breach. 5.6 Assessment of Costs If an Egyptian court agrees to factor litigation costs into the monetary amount granted as compensation, then the court should ascertain whether the winning party has actually incurred these costs. In other words, courts cannot grant compensation for potential costs; they must be definite costs.
The key types of interim relief granted by Egyptian courts are those meant to protect the status quo by ordering a party to abstain from doing one or more specific acts. The most common example is sum- mary orders or rulings issued by courts ordering a party to abstain from liquidating on-demand bonds, or to abstain from releasing money and/or goods to a specific party. 6.2 Interim Relief to Support Arbitration and ADR In Egypt, the current reality reflects a considerably low chance of success for applications for interim relief whether generally or in support of arbitration or ADR. This reality affects how disputing parties consider Egypt as a choice of forum for litigation and/or ADR. In order to be a truly arbitration-friendly jurisdiction, Egyptian courts should, in the authors’ opinion, recon- sider their stance in this respect so that the appropri- ate interim relief is granted whenever the particulars of a matter justifies the granting of such interim relief. 6.3 Timing of Applications for Interim Relief In the majority of cases that the authors have seen in practice, applications for interim relief are generally made and pursued prior to the initiation of a substan- tive case (whether before courts or arbitral tribunals). In some cases, circumstances that occur and evi- dence that is uncovered during a dispute incentivise disputing parties to resort to courts seeking interim relief. 6.4 Security for Costs In litigation, there are no applications for security for costs submitted to Egyptian courts. However, in arbi- trations seated in Egypt and/or governed by the Egyp- tian Arbitration Law, these are increasingly seen to be used for different strategic reasons. Arbitral tribunals rarely grant applications for security for costs. However, it is expected that arbitral tribu- nals will gradually become accustomed to the idea of granting such applications in light of their practical importance, provided of course that the particulars of the matter justify the granting of such applications.
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