Fraud and Arbitration: The Truth Untold.

The competitive climate arising from the liberal regime guaranteed by favor arbitrandum principle is likely to create a breeding ground for fraud in the field of arbitration law. In order to identify this risk, it is necessary to draw a distinction between, on the one hand, the litigants who resort to arbitration for the regular resolution of their dispute and, on the other hand, those who try to divert it from its legitimate purpose or to manipulate arbitrators into rendering an award on the basis of procedural manoeuvres. Ensuring an equal treatment for these two categories of litigants would consist in denying the favor arbitrandum, by challenging the rule that a liberal regime should be recognized only to authentic arbitration proceedings. In order to demonstrate that arbitration is not necessarily destined to become a potential tool for fraud, it is essential to set out the limits of the problem. In this perspective, this paper suggests a categorisation of different types of frauds specific to the field of arbitration, called "arbitral fraud" in this study. The article then takes into consideration the efforts that the arbitrators as well as the state courts will have to make in order to detect and to act against fraudulent arbitrations in the perspective of confronting the problem of arbitral frauds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]