Spain has filed an appeal with the US Supreme Court claiming sovereign immunity to avoid paying three arbitration awards totaling €358 million in favor of NextEra, 9Ren, and Blasket, stemming from the cuts in subsidies for renewable energy projects between 2010 and 2013.
In the document, dated May 1st and accessed by the newspaper Expansión, Spain requests that the court annul the judgment issued in August 2024 by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which upheld the validity of the awards and gave the green light for investors to litigate to enforce them. The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), the World Bank’s arbitration body, ordered Spain to pay compensation of €290 million to NextEra, €41 million to 9REN, and €26.5 million to AES – which later sold the rights to the Blasket Renewable Investments fund.
That ruling did not address whether or not the awards should be definitively enforced, but it did reject Spain’s “sovereign immunity,” considering that US district courts have jurisdiction to enforce them. This opened the door for companies and funds affected by the defaults to register their awards in the United States and claim their fulfillment there or request compensatory measures such as attachments.
Spain now refers to the decision taken by the European Commission on March 24th, when it determined that paying an award to a European investor constituted state aid and prohibited any such payment from being made. However, some of these investors are from outside the EU, such as the American company NextEra.
