International arbitration – IDRC, London
A year of dedicated work on a very demanding case was rounded off last week with our hearing before the international arbitration court IDRC in London. GARK Konzalting participated in a very demanding arbitration case worth tens of millions of euros where we were engaged as court expert witnesses – experts in the matter of determining possible damage in the field of hospitality – between two large international companies / clients and a hotel operator that were supposed to realize a large investment on the Adriatic coast in tourism in Croatia, but for various reasons it was interrupted and then ended up before international arbitration.
Throughout the week, 3 experts, engaged from each side, held presentations of their own expert findings, were heard and cross-examined by a large team of lawyers from each side. World-best law firms and their branches in London were engaged for this dispute. A total of 6 experts gave their testimonies for each area – one expert for each side for the issue of hospitality, finance and construction. After many hours of two-day testimony at the arbitration court, we successfully presented and defended our expert opinion at a hearing before three arbitrators and a large team of lawyers from both sides of the proceedings.
The participation of our engineers in this dispute once again demonstrated to our foreign clients as well as the best lawyers in the world that the expertise and knowledge of the majority of Croatian engineers is at a very high level, and we received recognition for a very demanding and well-written and successfully defended expert opinion and opinion before the court. In this Opinion, we elaborated in great detail our expert opinion regarding the subject matter of the arbitration dispute - the entire issue of building tourist facilities, the procedures of spatial planning, design, obtaining the necessary permits for construction and in general - on construction issues, all in order to help the arbitration court to better understand the subject matter of the dispute and to make it easier for it to make a decision in the case of this arbitration in which large international companies from completely different parts of the world participated.
Our expert team consisted of our two civil engineers from our company GARK Konzalting: Krunoslav Komesar and Andrija Stipić and our very valuable external collaborator - architect and urban planner Tea Horvat from the company Log Urbis d.o.o. from Zagreb.
