Victor Dahdaleh, the British-Canadian "power broker" whom the UK's Serious Fraud Office unsuccessfully prosecuted for alleged corruption last year, has won another important legal victory - a US court dismissed Aluminium Bahrain's longstanding $1bn lawsuit against him and ordered that the parties should instead go to arbitration.
Alba, Bahrain's national aluminium champion, was at the heart of the SFO's unsuccessful criminal trial. The company first sued Mr Dahdaleh in a Pennsylvania federal court in 2008 under racketeering laws, alleging that Alcoa, the US aluminium maker which Mr Dahdaleh represented, overcharged Alba for alumina and that bribes were paid to secure supply contracts.
Mr Dahdaleh, a billionaire who numbers former prime minister Tony Blair among his contacts, asked the judge - who had frozen the US lawsuit while the London criminal trial was taking place - to dismiss Alba's claims and instead compel the parties to use arbitration. Arbitration is a private form of dispute resolution.
Judge Donetta Ambrose granted Mr Dahdaleh's application on Monday, according to a copy of the judgment.
"It is ordered that the first amended complaint is dismissed without prejudice. It is further ordered that should plaintiff Aluminum Bahrain B.S.C. choose to pursue its claims against Mr. Dahdaleh, it may do so only in arbitration," the order reads.
Mumtalakat, the Bahraini holding company that owns Alba, did not respond to a request seeking comment.
"I am delighted that this case in the US has now been dismissed following my successful acquittal in the UK. It should have been dismissed long ago," Mr Dahdaleh said through his London lawyers, Norton Rose Fulbright.
Alba's US lawsuit prompted prosecutors, including the Department of Justice and the SFO, to launch their own criminal investigations into the bribery allegations. A unit of Alcoa, with whom Alba settled a parallel civil lawsuit in 2012, paid $384m in January and pleaded guilty to a bribery charge following an investigation by DoJ and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The various probes lifted the veil at a sensitive time on Bahraini's ruling family, with the prime minister pitted against the crown prince.
A London jury, meanwhile, was told to return a not-guilty verdict in the trial of Mr Dahdaleh in December after an attorney from Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, Alba's law firm, refused to appear as a prosecution witness as planned. An SFO lawyer also admitted during cross-examination by Mr Dahdaleh's barrister that the SFO had "delegated" its investigation in Bahrain to Akin Gump, which was simultaneously representing Alba in its civil lawsuit against Mr Dahdaleh and Alcoa, and assisting the SFO with its investigation.
Mr Dahdaleh admitted paying £38m to Sheikh Isa bin Ali al-Khalifa, at the time Alba's chairman and a key ally of Bahrain's prime minister, but said the payments were not corrupt. Sheikh Isa denies all wrongdoing.
With additional reporting by Simeon Kerr in Dubai
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