DENMARK Law and Practice Contributed by: Johannes Grove Nielsen, Jakob Lentz, Anne Buhl Bjelke and Daniel Myhre Engell, Bech-Bruun Law Firm P/S
• state-owned entities’ assets are executable only if the entity is the debtor (or in exceptional cases where separate personality can be disregarded). Piercing the Corporate/Sovereign Veil The Danish courts have not reported any investor– state precedent in which the separate legal personal- ity of a state-owned enterprise (SOE) has been disre- garded for purposes of enforcing an award. SOEs are treated as distinct legal persons, and recov- ery normally requires either that the SOE itself is the award debtor or that there is compelling evidence of an alter ego or abuse of form theory under general principles – an approach applied only rarely. SOE assets may be reachable where the claim is directed against the entity itself. These observations derive primarily from Danish enforcement practice in relation to foreign judgments and arbitral awards; there is no specific ISDS prec- edent regarding relaxing the corporate veil.
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