Quinn Emanuel has defeated Mexico’s second collateral attack on the NAFTA win we scored against the country two years ago, a resounding vindication of a victory nearly a decade in the making.
On July 2 the Court of Appeal for Ontario, in a rare move, dismissed Mexico’s appeal from the bench and immediately after oral argument by Mexico’s counsel. The court rejected outright Mexico's latest attempt to avoid paying the NAFTA award issued in favor of our 37 U.S. investor clients, led by a stalwart father-daughter team from Colorado.
David Orta, Chair of Quinn Emanuel’s U.S. International Arbitration Practice and Latin America International Arbitration Practice, led the team that made it happen. The team included Julianne Jaquith and Woo Yong Chung, who worked with our excellent colleagues at Torys LLP in Toronto and Orta to defeat both of Mexico’s collateral attacks.
Military-Style Raids
Our clients spent almost eight years fighting Mexico in a NAFTA arbitration after the Mexican government – in an about-face following a change in administration – revoked our clients’ casino permit and shut down their five thriving casinos in military-style raids in 2014. That was about a year and a half after the prior administration had granted them a 25-year permit.
We replaced prior counsel in early 2017, before the arbitration proceedings started, and have been representing the clients ever since. In June 2024, after we secured jurisdictional wins following a jurisdictional trial and various unsuccessful appeal attempts by Mexico, a NAFTA tribunal of well-known international arbitrators found Mexico liable for breaching NAFTA’s fair-and-equitable-treatment standard, awarding our clients over US$80 million in damages plus interest and fees.
With interest, that sum now totals roughly just over $148 million, making it the largest publicly known NAFTA treaty award ever entered against Mexico.
‘Impeccable’ Tribunal
Unhappy with that result, Mexico turned to the Ontario courts – the legal seat of the arbitration – seeking to set the award aside, arguing principally that the tribunal had denied it a fair opportunity to present its case. Working alongside Torys, we defeated Mexico’s set-aside application in October.
Justice Black of the Ontario Superior Court dismissed the Mexican application in full, finding that Mexico had presented “a revisionist history” of “routine and largely inconsequential” procedural rulings by a panel whose expertise he described as “impeccable.”
Mexico appealed again, this time to the Ontario Court of Appeal, with oral argument on July 2. The justices grilled Mexico’s counsel for just over two hours, recessed for about 20 minutes, and returned to announce that they didn’t need to hear argument from our side. Instead, they read out their decision from the bench, dismissing the appeal as having no merit at all.
Mexico could still attempt to seek review by the Supreme Court of Canada, but as with the U.S. high court, it is rarely granted, and is particularly unlikely given how emphatically the Court of Appeal rejected Mexico’s arguments.
Among the other indispensable members of the QE team over the long haul were Daniel Salinas-Serrano, Dawn Yamane Hewett, Sara Clark, José R. Pereyó, and Ana Paula Luna Pino, along with our paralegal and staff members who worked on the underlying trials and NAFTA wins.